[conspire] cd burning giving slight errors

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Peter Knaggs (peter.knaggs at gmail.com):

> The curious thing is that at the time I'd remembered your
> thread about using parallel kernel compiles and for this
> motherboard issue it didn't have any trouble completing
> them all clean with no errors. So maybe we need to add
> "reading CDs at high speed" to the battery of memory tests,
> as crazy as that sounds, maybe a bootable CD "system
> stress-tester" that sha256sums its own image over and over,
> while merrily kicking off parallel kernel compiles, heh!

Yeah, interesting.  If I were more of a hardware engineer, I'd
probably be able to say what's unique about CD-reading and what
hardware stress-testing would reveal flaws in the memory bus that 
manifest only while doing that.

Unfortunately, I'm just an information magpie who diagnoses hardware
only when precautions against hassle fail to protect me from the need to
do it.  ;->

> I was wondering have you encountered any troubles with
> I/O to flash memory (specifically the 32GB "MicroSDHC" variety from SanDisk,
> that comes with a little "adapter sdcard" so that you can plug it in).
> I've found that older varieties (16GB MicroSDHC) cards work
> fine (reading at around 18MB/s according to "dd"), but the newer
> ones give tons of errors during writing, no troubles reading
> (this is with the 3.2.0-29-generic kernel),
> but work fine with writing in Apple OSX 10.6.8  (pretty old at this point).

No, I haven't.  I hear a lot of disturbing rumours about problems with 
flash memory devices.  I'm sorry to hear that you're one of the people 
tracing out the problem areas so I don't have to.  (You probably know
the joke about being able to distinguish the pioneers by the arrows
sticking out of their backs.)