T23 does not like some flash drives

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#1 Post by **gator** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 11:34 pm

My T23 (running W2K) is pretty selective in reading USB flash drives. I don't know if this is a W2K issue, or a USB 1.1/USB 2 incompatibility issue, or a problem specific to my T23. I intend to investigate in detail as I find time. Just for the record, I have never had any trouble in using any USB mice/keyboard with the T23.

I tested my T23 with many, many flash drives over the last 2-3 weeks and these are the brands I had absolutely no problems reading:

1. Sandisk (tested models: cruzer 1 GB/2 GB/ 4 GB, cruzer mini)
2. Lenovo (tested model: 1 GB, this is mine, got it for free when I bought my T60)
3. Memorex 256 MB (my first USB drive from 2004, still works great)
4. Lexar (tested model: jumpdrive)

The following models will randomly fail to read in either USB port. Insertion of the USB drive will immediately result in CPU temperature shooting up rapidly, and the drives will show up as 0 MB capacity with no data on them. Removing the flash drive will at times make the T23 run normal again, but sometimes I had to restart to control the temperatures. All of the following drives worked normally on my T60, a dell 600m and a dell P4 desktop.

1. Kingston - best of the 'unreadable' bunch; will read ~80% of the time, with the occasional hickup.
2. PNY (even fairly new ones)
3. A-data (higher capacity models)

Age of the flash drive and its usage pattern obviously are important in its reliability, but I was wondering if anyone else here has these issues with T2x models.

phool@round · #2 Post by **phool@round** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 12:00 am

PNY Attache' 2GB - perfect reads/writes. Whines about low power/faster speed in XP.

Edge diskGO 512MB - perfect reads/writes. Whines about low power/faster speed in XP.

#3 Post by **rkawakami** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 1:54 am

I'll have to see if I can find a W2K drive and try this out on a couple of random T23s. Problem is that I only have a few USB thumb drives: Lexar, SanDisk and Lenovo; all ones that you are not having trouble with

. I am fairly sure that I have Kingston, A-Data and/or PNY Secure Digital and Compact Flash cards but even if I use a USB card reader, that's not going to be the same as plugging in a real thumb drive.

I'm not sure if I checked out your T23 with a flash drive or not. I know I've used some before with other systems and my daughter uses one to back up her school assignments (at least that's what she tells me). But again, that's on an XP system with a Lexar drive I think. My normal procedure to check out the USB ports is to plug in a mouse. I'll start using a flash drive as well. The extra current required may trigger a hidden problem with the port.

I remembered running across some discussions before about having problems with flash drives and I dug this up but don't know if applies to your problem:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archi ... 55047.aspx

#4 Post by **gator** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 1:36 pm

I am going to test the USB behavior with linux (debian etch, in a ultrabay HDD adapter) on the T23 today. I'll edit this post later today evening with the results.

SMA · #5 Post by **SMA** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 1:59 pm

Might be a matter of what file system is on the drive.
Note, that these devices can be formatted - similar to a normal hdd.

#6 Post by **gator** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 11:10 pm

nah, the filesystem is fine. That was one of the first things I checked up.

I had some interesting results with debian. I was able to read a PNY drive that did not work in W2K. The behaviour with Kingston and A-data is the same as in Windows. I guess not all USB drives are designed equally, after all

T23 does not like some flash drives

T23 does not like some flash drives

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