i2cset applet is unable to properly communicate to AT24C256 EEPROM chip, reading works, write does not.

here's a testcase with busybox 1.26.2 on a raspberry pi 1:

# writing 3 bytes (0x05) to the first 3 memory registers

# i2c address of eeprom chip
address="0x50"
# memory register
memory_address1="0x00"
memory_address2="0x00"
value="0x05"
i2cset -y 0 ${address} ${memory_address1} ${memory_address2} ${value} ${value} ${value} i

# reading back to verify write was successful
i2cset -y 0 ${address}
i2cget -y 0 ${address}; i2cget -y 0 ${address}; i2cget -y 0 ${address}

using busybox applet no error is reported, but the data is not written to chip. i2cset from i2c-tools works as expected.