On Monday 17 February 2025 17:16:51 Greenwich Mean Time Grant Edwards wrote: > 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
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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