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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