ext2 always dirty

[Eric R. Wick]

DNS-325 A1, RC5

The idea is not dead, to place the minidlna database and cache to an external ssd on the usb port, so content can be browsed while the harddrives are sleeping on. But found a curious problem.
Alt-F mounts the ssd automated and reported it's ext2 as dirty. I choose ext2 to get of journaling that has destroyed an usb key before. But alt-f reports the filesystem as dirty. I can check and check-force it but there after it is dirty. I formatted it again with alt-f and right after that it is reported in red as dirty. Minidlna dislike to start on a dirty filesystem.
Do we have a bug in the ext2 handling?

Plugged a new Transcend usb ssd into the device, formatted it from vfat to ext2. Result:

Unable to automatically fix sdc1, mounting Read Only: fsck 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
fsck.ext4: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sdc1
/dev/sdc1: 
The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
    e2fsck -b 8193 

The filesystem ext2 is dirty and trashed when formatting has ended.

Eric

[João Cardoso]

On Saturday, 16 July 2016 12:06:34 UTC+1, Eric R. Wick wrote:

DNS-325 A1, RC5

The idea is not dead, to place the minidlna database and cache to an external ssd on the usb port, so content can be browsed while the harddrives are sleeping on. But found a curious problem.
Alt-F mounts the ssd automated and reported it's ext2 as dirty.

ext2 is dirty by design; right after being mounted is marked as dirty in the event of a power failure. On a clean unmount it is marked as not dirty.

This has noting to do with Alt-F or has any impact on the system, Alt-F only shows you what 'tune2fs' says about it, and I don't think that minidlna checks that.

If that concerns you I think that you can use ext3/4 and disable journaling as a mount option (Disk->Filesystem, Edit "Mount Options" and "Set Mnt Options" under "FS Operations")

Is your SSD any of these?

[Eric R. Wick]

Like to solve my question, got a transcend usb key SSD with 1GB now. It was formatted with ext4 and mounted with noatime, this one runs solid as store for minidlna. So the database can be accessed without delay, before the hard disks have to spin up. The transcend is a real SSD with wear level chip on it, that makes it more expensive as a plain usb key. But this works pretty nice since some months here.