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

[Frank Steinmetzger <Warp_7@gmx.de>]

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Am Mon, Feb 17, 2025 at 04:38:22PM +0000 schrieb Stroller:
> 
> 
> > On 15 Feb 2025, at 07:41, Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net> wrote:
> > ...
> > Has anyone else encountered this ?  Does anyone have suggestions ?
> 
> Create multiple large files on your desktop PC. You could use movie files if you have a small number of large enough files handy. I would prefer 5 files of about 45GB, and I would create them using `for i in {1..5} ; do dd if=/dev/random of=random$i ; done` and a file size specifier to dd.
> 
> md5sum the files, copy them to the drive and md5sum the copies. Do the md5sums match up?

Methinks it should be enough to create one file of, say, 1 GB and copy that 
over with a new name each time until the drive is full. All files should 
return the same md5. This will also save you from writing dozens of GB to 
your main storage because you need its md5 beforehand (unless you have a 
big enough ramdisk).

NUM=1
while cp -v /path/to/source /path/to/stick/file$NUM; do NUM=$((NUM + 1))

When the drive is full, cp fails and the loop should end.

Or use a flash test program as was mentioned in a recent other post. Either 
way, going from the discussion so far, I would not trust those sticks until 
fully written to and read back. There are basically three tiers of Flash 
memory quality: the best goes into SSDs, the second-best goes into Memory 
cards or emmc (IIRC) and the “garbage” goes into USB sticks.

The computer store might be OK, but they have no control over what they get 
sent. There was a recrent scandal here in Germany about allegedly new 
Seagate HDDs being actually used drives from Chia farms whose SMART values 
have been reset. This only came to light because Seagate uses another set of 
internal diagnostic data that was not reset and showed several thousand 
hours of power-on-time. Several big retailers were affected because the 
problem was with the distributor.

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