Re: [gentoo-user] Re: problem formatting new 256 GB USB stick : more info

[Michael <confabulate@kintzios.com>]

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On Monday 17 February 2025 17:16:51 Greenwich Mean Time Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2025-02-17, Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net> wrote:
> > The sticks were delivered, so I can't easily return them,
> > & in any case we've had  50 cm  snow dumped on us in the last few days.
> > If a Linux file system really is unachievable,
> 
> Sounds to me like the USB flash drives might be fakes.  They might
> have only a small fraction of the advertixed space, and the controller
> chip firmware has been fudged to pretend there's 256GB.  As long as
> you only use a small portion of the "pretend" space and follow access
> patterns the match the controller's faking algorithm, the flash drives
> will "work".
> 
> > I can format the sticks as FAT, which sb adequate for simple
> > archiving.
> 
> I'd be very, very careful about that.  If you can't reformat them with
> a different filesystem, I wouldn't trust that writing large amounts of
> data to them will work regardless of the filesystem.
> 
> I would only use them for archiving if you do multiple verify passes
> on _everything_ after you've done a backup.
> 
> --
> Grant

It is worth mentioning the sys-block/f3 package (Fight Flash Fraud), which is 
in portage and can test a USB flash disk to discover if it is fake.  Besides 
the slower f3write and f3read, the f3probe command will only take a few 
minutes and confirm the available space.

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