[gentoo-user] problem formatting new 256 GB USB stick

[Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net>]

Recently, I bought  2  new Kingston Exodia  256 GB  USB sticks
from Canada Computers, the store in Toronto I've used for  25 yr .
With many previous new USB sticks of sizes  <= 128 GB
& which came with a VFat filesystem,
I simply repartitioned them using Fdisk, which created a Linux partition
& then used 'mke2fs' to format them with an Ext2 filesystem.
This time, something has gone wrong :

  root:538 ~> mke2fs /dev/sdb1
  mke2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
  Creating filesystem with 60567296 4k blocks and 15147008 inodes
  Filesystem UUID: 80c2f275-ed6b-4ef5-b785-b53bd225ca9e
  Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912,
    819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000,
    23887872
  Allocating group tables: done                            
  Writing inode tables: done                            
  Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information:
    mke2fs: Input/output error while writing out and closing file system

I tried repartitioning the stick into  2 x 128 GB  partitions,
in case it was the sheer size which was the problem, but got the same result.
The error occured with both sticks, so it doesn't seem to be bad hardware.
It took  10 h 40 m  to process the  256 GB  part'n on my 2023 desktop machine,
so trying suggestions cb a rather long-drawn-out affair (smile).

Has anyone else encountered this ?  Does anyone have suggestions ?

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