Rick's b.log - entry 2026/01/24

More on that hub

If I turn on my computer (from standby, opening the lid) and plug in the hub to the USB 3 port, and then plug in the harddiscs, the hub is seen as a USB 2.1 hub, and the harddiscs aren't seen at all.

If I unplug the hub, shut down the computer, plug the hub in, then wake the machine up again...

usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 19 using xhci_hcd
usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=05e3, idProduct=0610, bcdDevice= 6.63
usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
usb 1-2: Product: USB2.1 Hub
usb 1-2: Manufacturer: GenesysLogic
hub 1-2:1.0: USB hub found
hub 1-2:1.0: 4 ports detected
usb 2-1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 35 using xhci_hcd
usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=05e3, idProduct=0626, bcdDevice= 6.63
usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
usb 2-1: Product: USB3.1 Hub
usb 2-1: Manufacturer: GenesysLogic
hub 2-1:1.0: USB hub found
hub 2-1:1.0: 4 ports detected
usb 2-1.1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 36 using xhci_hcd
usb 2-1.1: New USB device found, idVendor=07aa, idProduct=004e, bcdDevice=19.05
usb 2-1.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 2-1.1: Product: CG-HDCUS3F
usb 2-1.1: Manufacturer: corega
usb 2-1.1: SerialNumber: 0000000000006153
usb-storage 2-1.1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
scsi host0: usb-storage 2-1.1:1.0
usb 2-1.2: new SuperSpeed USB device number 37 using xhci_hcd
usb 2-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=0578, bcdDevice= 2.09
usb 2-1.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 2-1.2: Product: USB to ATA/ATAPI Bridge
usb 2-1.2: Manufacturer: JMicron
usb 2-1.2: SerialNumber: 0123456789ABCDEF
scsi host1: uas
scsi 1:0:0:0: Direct-Access     JMicron  Generic          0209 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
sd 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] 976773168 512-byte logical blocks: (500 GB/466 GiB)
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] 4096-byte physical blocks
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 53 00 00 08
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Disabling FUA
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Preferred minimum I/O size 4096 bytes
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Optimal transfer size 33553920 bytes not a multiple of preferred minimum block size (4096 bytes)
 sda: sda1
sd 1:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
usb 2-1.1: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 36 using xhci_hcd
usb 2-1.1: USB disconnect, device number 36
usb 2-1.1: Device not responding to setup address.
usb 2-1.1: Device not responding to setup address.
usb 2-1.1: device not accepting address 38, error -71
usb 2-1.1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 39 using xhci_hcd
usb 2-1.1: New USB device found, idVendor=07aa, idProduct=004e, bcdDevice=19.05
usb 2-1.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 2-1.1: Product: CG-HDCUS3F
usb 2-1.1: Manufacturer: corega
usb 2-1.1: SerialNumber: 0000000000006153
usb-storage 2-1.1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
scsi host0: usb-storage 2-1.1:1.0
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     TOSHIBA  MQ01ABD100M      AX1P PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] 1953525165 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
 sdb: sdb1
sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
usb 2-1.1: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 39 using xhci_hcd
usb 2-1.1: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 39 using xhci_hcd
usb 2-1.1: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 39 using xhci_hcd
usb 2-1.1: USB disconnect, device number 39
sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=18s
sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 00 00 3f 00 00 08 00

I did once manage to get the machine to get as far as seeing the 1TB drive, but it didn't mount it because it saw a 1TB unallocated partition.

Therefore, it was quite clear to me that the only combination that was going to work was hooking the hub to USB 2. Given that it, and the drive, do appear to support USB 3, I am wondering if it is Linux (or maybe this specific machine) that is the glitch? Unfortunately I don't have any other USB 3 hardware to check.

Oh, and since I'm me and since this thing was inexpensive and returning it as "doesn't work as advertised" would be far more hassle than it's worth, especially given at it might not be the device at fault...

Inside the hub.

Very barebones, isn't it? A 25MHz crystal, some surface mount resistors and capacitors, one bright blue LED, and a GL3510 chip - this is a 4 port USB (1.1, 2.0, and 3.1) hub that also supports various charging protocols, including Samsung and Apple fast charging. Note that there appears to be space for a serial flash, not fitted. Apparently this is supposed to be for firmware, as the firmware on the built-in ROM is really rather rudimentary, only really intended for booting and getting going until better firmware is loaded.
The micro-processor of the GL3510 is an 8 bit RISC processor with 20KiB of ROM and 256 bytes of RAM. It operates at 12MIPS from a maximum 12MHz clock (the device itself runs at 25MHz).
I wasn't able to find out what sort of processor is installed, only that Firefox's built-in translation is so slow that I was able to turn on my phone, find the same page, and get Chrome to translate it, then read it, then turn off my phone... before Firefox had translated the page I was looking at. Seriously, page translation times measured in minutes are not fit for purpose.

Fixing a FAT drive under Linux

So I made a copy of everything to the 500GB drive before getting dosfsck to fix things. The 1TB drive was connected to the hub connected to the USB2 port, with the 500GB drive connected to the USB3 port on the other side. Running at 21.2MiB/sec, so took a while.

Lots of data, lots of time.

It may be that dosfsck does a competent job and doesn't arbitrarily trash data. I still have horrors of SCANDISK that used to arbitrarily delete files and, worse, replace damaged sectors with null bytes and not say anything. It might be annoying-but-not-world-ending to have 512 bytes of a text file replaced by nulls, but try doing that to an executable...

ChkDsk was only marginally better in that it would dump unknown data into a series of .chk files. But it didn't try particularly hard. There was one floppy that had errors and I was able to open and look at most of the files (and copy them to another floppy). When I gave it to ChkDsk it simply turned the entire thing into a bunch of recovered files with all sorts of rubbish attached at either end. It's like it didn't even bother to see what matched the directory. Oh, and while I'm whinging about how lousy Microsoft's tools were at handling their own disc format... early versions of RISC OS DOSFS only handled FAT partitions up to 2GB. But, being RISC OS, there was absolutely no protection to reject larger partitions. I didn't know/remember this and I inserted a 4GB USB stick. Things went very wrong very quickly. So I put the USB stick into my XP box to get it to fix the mess. The VFAT driver immediately died horribly, and is one of the few times my XP box bluescreened on me (the other was a shonky CP2102 serial driver).

Anyway, long and boring story short, copy stuff off the drive (just in case) and then try to repair it. If I don't need to have done that, I've only spent n hours, and since both devices are spinning rust it's not as if I've worn out a bunch of flash sectors.

It is worth taking a moment here to raise an eyebrow. The theoretical speed of USB 2 is 480Mbps, which implies that it ought to be capable of 60MiB/sec. As you can see I'm only getting 21.2. Now, we ought to knock off about a quarter for worst-case protocol overheads. This gives us around 45MiB/sec. So why am I only getting half of that?
Logically you could say that it's because I'm transferring between two USB harddiscs, so divide the bandwidth by two. This would be logical enough if everything was hanging off a single USB 2 hub/port, but the 500GB drive is a USB 3 device plugged into a USB 3 port (theoretically up to 1250MiB/sec - but it benchmarks at around 100MiB/sec slowly dropping to 85MiB/sec (read of 10MiB chunks) with an 18msec seek time). By comparison, the 1TB drive via the hub on USB 2 benchmarks at a fairly steady 37MiB/sec with equal 18msec seek times.
I think the reality is that my machine is... not the quickest. Unless the 500GB drive really struggles to maintain a write speed, and there's no reason why it should as it is spinning rust and not flash, then the slowest part is reading from the source drive at 37MiB/sec, yet I'm seeing just a little over half of that.
By comparison, the internal SSD benchmarks at 153MiB/sec with a 0.18msec seek time, and the µSD card manages 75MiB/sec read with 0.56msec access. Both are via an MMC host built into the PCI PCU (power control unit?).
Though, being flash, these may struggle more with writing - though for reasons I'm not going to try a write test.

Later...

I saw this.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

This continued for each subsequent file. Uhhh....???

So I unplugged the drive (couldn't dismount, it was no longer there), plugged it back in again, it started up and... appeared as a drive with nothing - it existed as far as lsusb could see, but there was nothing in lsblk as it wasn't ever attached as a usable drive. I couldn't be arsed to dmesg to see what it was whinging about, so I decided to unplug and replug the hub, get Linux to re-enumerate all of devices on that port.
I unplugged the hub and the harddisc instantly died.

Wait, what? That's not supposed to do that...

And that, dear reader, was the exact moment that my eyes flipped up to the microwave, that I turned off because it was damp inside from making something and I wanted to leave the door open but not have the light on inside.
Then my eyes followed the lead plugged into the same three-way socket that went across by the air fryer, then down.....right to the seat of my chair where the power adaptor for the hub was connected. 🤦

Bravo, Rick, you twat. Way to go, dumbarse. It's almost as if you're actually trying to screw this up, rather than just "the attention span of a pomegranate that's past its best".

So, oven door closed, the dampness having evaporated, I turned the power back on, plugged the hub and harddisc back in, and what do you know - it all magically works again. Whodathunk?

I had to work out how far the copying had done - the above error being a big help - and set up to finish what had been missed.

Resuming where I left off.

I went to bed, listened to a CD, doomscrolled, and stared at the ceiling. Tried not to feel a right spanner for turning the thing off in the middle of it being used. Duh.

A little later, I got up, came back into the kitchen, and did a quick check (select all folders, itemise contents for same number of files and size) and everything was mostly good. Mostly, because the copy had one 10K file more. I wasn't going to question it.

I dismounted the drive, and ran sudo dosfsck /dev/sda1 and it immediately threw back an error. Oh, yes, both copies of the FAT were screwy so I had to pick one. Based upon the logic that Linux itself was probably using the first, I told it -F 1 to use the first. It thought about it awhile, the drive LED blinking red and green like crazy. Then it reported so many files taking so much space.
I ran it again, giving the -n -v options instead, to just check and be verbose about it.

rick@Rick-E200HA:~$ sudo dosfsck -n -v /dev/sda1
fsck.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
Checking we can access the last sector of the filesystem
Boot sector contents:
System ID "MSWIN4.1"
Media byte 0xf8 (hard disk)
       512 bytes per logical sector
     32768 bytes per cluster
        32 reserved sectors
First FAT starts at byte 16384 (sector 32)
         2 FATs, 32 bit entries
 122065920 bytes per FAT (= 238410 sectors)
Root directory start at cluster 2 (arbitrary size)
Data area starts at byte 244148224 (sector 476852)
  30516378 data clusters (999960674304 bytes)
63 sectors/track, 255 heads
        63 hidden sectors
1953525102 sectors total
Checking for unused clusters.
Checking free cluster summary.
/dev/sda1: 16232 files, 9269265/30516378 clusters
rick@Rick-E200HA:~$ 

It doesn't say "drive is good", that would be too much like being friendly. But, on the other hand, it doesn't say "All your data are gone to heaven" so there's that.

But for absolute confirmation, I also did a "Check filesystem..." from the UI Disk manager.

Confirmed - it's all good.

Continuity error in Patience!

As a side note, it is a remake of a French/Belgian series called "Astrid in Paris" (I think, I haven't watched it).

Anyway, episode four involves the death of a locally famous author. About five minutes in, Patience spots a crime novel and has a reminiscence of her father giving a copy to her as a child because it would have been more challenging than what she had been reading.

Just before the monochromatic flashback, we can see her looking at the book and clearly wearing blue latex gloves.

Screenshot from Patience 1.4
© Eagle Eye Drama Limited / Channel Four Television.

Just after the flashback, Detective Bea hands Patience a pair of blue latex gloves and tells her to put them on.

Screenshot from Patience 1.4
© Eagle Eye Drama Limited / Channel Four Television.

Um... ☺ Actually, she's wearing them right from the beginning of the scene. And I just had a look at IMDb and there are no goofs listed.

Screenshot from Patience 1.4
© Eagle Eye Drama Limited / Channel Four Television.

I finally got fed up with Celluloid's erratic behaviour. Now my system throws these videos to mpv by default, which is no-frills (doesn't even seem to have a menu!) but loads quickly and just lets me get on with watching stuff.

Plugs

Well, at the Leclerc I got a cheaper plug...that did have a finger loop. So much easier to deal with.

Finger loop for ease.

It was a fairly simple matter of unscrewing the old plug and transferring the wires across to the new plug.

Or was it?

Tell me what you notice from this photo:

Inside two French plugs.

Look carefully.

Here's a hint, notice the embossed letters by the terminals.

The SuperU plug has them marked, left to right, as L, earth, N. The Leclerc plug has them marked the other way around.

Leclerc is correct. When correctly wired, to the current standard (NF C 61-314 I think), a socket is like the UK - live is on the right.
However unlike the UK, this was never historically enforced because it wasn't until sockets had an earth pin that they even bothered with which way up they went, and the smaller unearthed 5A plugs ("EuroPlug") still go either way around. All of the 16A sockets (to match the plug shown) can accept 5A plugs, most USB power adaptors fall into this category.
Anyway, given this amount of "whatever", it's probably not a surprise that there is incorrect stuff on sale. Indeed, this is not the first time I have bought something from the SuperU that was wired incorrectly, though that one was especially egregious because it swapped the pins between the plug and the sockets.
That being said, the incorrect socket reads "CE AA2400188 12/2024" on a little sticker affixed to it. I find it astounding that they managed to get a socket approved fairly recently when the markings of how to wire it up are wrong.

A USB charger beside a normal plug.

You might notice the "extension" piece between the pins and the device body. This is so that the body can sit outside the socket, and also clear of the earth pin, as shown here.

A USB charger plugged in.

For those few of you who may be unfamiliar, this is a British 13A plug (we call it 13A because they're usually fitted with a 13A fuse).

British and French plugs.

Say what you want about the UK plug, and if you step on one you'll say quite a lot - none of it nice, but they are easy to insert and remove from the socket, they "feel right" and don't try to start a fight. The cable tidily goes downwards, it doesn't stick out the back like a hair in a pimple. And it won't fall out of the wall if somebody pulls the cord. I have seen somebody in a supermarket (not my place of work, thankfully) "unplugging" an extension lead by grabbing the cable several metres away and just yanking it. And since the country standardised on the one single type of plug for domestic use (want a 3A plug? just fit a 3A fuse!) you don't have a problem trying to mix and match different sized plugs and sockets.
Also, it is worth noting that the method of opening the protective cover over the live and neutral is the longer earth pin, that gently presses them down and out of the way. The French plug, by contrast, has to push a sprung piece of plastic out of the way (sideways, clockwise, it depends on the socket), and the force of doing this wears down the plastic ramp that guides it out of the way until you need to be rather violent to get the damn plug into the socket. Sometimes less expensive sockets and those on extension leads are like this when they're new.

Let's end this nerd-out on plugs by looking at two more common versions of the French plug.

Two other commonplace types of plug.

On the right is the minimalist plug used by my induction hob. It is insulated so doesn't require an earth.
On the left is my kettle. With a touchable metal piece (that may be part of the element), it does require an earth. But note the metal strip along the length of the plug. There's a similar metal strip on the other side. This is a hybrid plug (CEE 7/7) that is compatible with both type E (CEE 7/5, used in France, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic) and type F (CEE 7/3, used in much of the rest of Europe). The difference is that the earth contact on type E is a pin protruding from the socket, while on type F it is two contacts down the top and bottom sides of the socket.
Despite a slightly different pin spacing, it apparently is possible to wedge something into the earth pin of a UK socket to open the shutters over the live and neutral, and then shove one of these plugs in using a small measure of brute force. This, of course, means that not only will your equipment not be earthed, you'll also slightly expose bare metal of the connections because there is no plastic shroud because the recessed sockets perform this function.

A shall refrain from regaling you with pictures and descriptions of the other sockets (and plugs) around here. Like the 3+E, the 3+N+E, and the chunky 20A (?) single phase socket. And, just for good measure, there's a shaver socket in the bathroom, from those more innocent days when one had shavers that plugged in, and didn't think anything about using them in the presence of water.

Deneigement

A plastic snow shovel.

Taken literally, "deneigement" would be "unsnowing". The "maintenance" just means it is the one to be used by maintenance as opposed to... I dunno... anybody not maintenance. ☺

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jgh, 24th January 2026, 23:18

*File* allocation is the weakest part of FAT filesystems, particularly a table that allocate the location of *ALL* the files on a filesystem. If the *file* allocation gets screwed, the entire filesystem is inaccessible. If a *free* *space* table is screwed, you can access everything in the filesystem, but just can't *save* anything.    I think FAT is the only filesystem I've worked on where "what is used" is in a fragile structure instead of "what is not used".

Zerosquare, 25th January 2026, 03:17

I wouldn't trust that USB hub, anyways.    The reference design for the GL3510 chip has large electrolytic capacitors near each port:  https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/coolgear/CG-3510S 4-BOARD/13546120    Your hub only has tiny ceramic capacitors there, meaning it's one of those (unfortunately very common) products that's been "cost-optimized" by removing components until it's "just barely good enough to pass the 5-second test at the factory".     And you'd think that at worst, it would just slow down or fail completely, but I've read things about silent data corruption in some cases. So... caveat emptor.

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