On 2025-02-17, Philip Webb <purs...@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
