On Thursday, 26 November 2020 00:10:00 GMT Michael wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 November 2020 17:37:15 GMT Dr Rainer Woitok wrote:
> > Greetings,
> > 
> > since my old  64 GB Verbatim USB sticks  became too small,  I bought two
> > new 128 GB  Philips sticks.   Because I need  to read  and write them on
> > both, a stand-alone Windows laptop (not connected to the internet) runn-
> > ing Windows Vista and Cygwin and my Gentoo laptop, I encrypted them with
> > old TrueCrypt  on the Windows box,  using them under Gentoo in TrueCrypt
> > compatibility mode.
> > 
> > This worked  well with the Verbatim  USB sticks  (which probably are USB
> > 2.0),  but while reading the new USB 3.0 Philips USB sticks is signific-
> > antly faster  than reading the old Verbatim USB sticks,  writing to them
> > is slow as hell under Gentoo.   And writing to the Philips USB sticks on
> > the old Vista laptop  with USB 2.0 ports  clearly outperforms writing to
> > them using the Gentoo laptop's USB 3.0 ports.
> > 
> > This could be a problem with TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt or with somehow miscon-
> > figured USB ports.   To check for the latter  I provide below all kernel
> > configuration variables I regard USB related in the hope that some know-
> 
> > ledgable people might find a glitch in there:
> Check dmesg to see if initialisation of the USB 3.0 drive throws up any
> errors.  Then check 'lsusb -t' to make sure it has been recognised as a USB
> 3.0.
> 
> If write operations without TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt are equally slow, then
> obviously the problem is not with encryption.
> 
> I've read in a number of articles the erase block size on most USB flash
> (NAND) is 128KB, which incurs a lot of operations on a write, when using
> Linux with its 4K size sectors.  Partitioning the USB drive to use 128KB
> sectors and then aligning the fs on it should improve matters.
> 
> I found this article which mentions an experiment with ext4 fs.  A more
> effective search should hopefully bring up examples on FAT fs.
> 
> HTH.

Apologies, I seem to have forgotten to include the link.  Here's another link 
I came across today and which offers more detail on this topic:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device