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

On 2025-02-17, Philip Webb <[email protected]> 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.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iQIzBAABCAAdFiEEXqhvaVh2ERicA8Ceseqq9sKVZxkFAmezfAYACgkQseqq9sKV ZxnLRhAAkdNSAt/oyErEJB04TwcqjHz4iv6sNJn2XUQ4zrVa/1I53rfFBNjRWYmL mxks9s+iU+nea485dywCeSWtdihNYkcS2B8HZXSUiZdYmteru0gUQ5wYZHHLJIqF gMMYVvNNK6Sw06Wrf20yztP0J2UXwlDu73hJG9VWTZGykYvUFhRvEt7JftAXFvIi 6pXynE0B/5270i1WnkgV7fjW7rPriQGqbepLPpYtwFs0rLxb8JbZE4K6mU/cKCBX SWZL1gNl5nwju5YH7VMHzSwyuonFWwaQJyZNUlASlVDbulJJjH570RMaukkVI9Sf jp7P8tKWwkOtqyqcmcsoxvcLRekKPnD9bNIpiPDWpFCoFANeYzxbsDXWEUiKx8x8 c0VawTpoaDzF0AH1jv/DpRvUVmLPw/7WU+9s45KosH8KYe5ne/7W0mnamJWKSYW9 akT2V9LuQEbgX7GYknh9BGH9KcI/DnlQf9DhWlCMkKvqTUatuDSk3wxfLr4P73mA fmF0l5rB82S5xzsURpuDT4W2hOjMby9PUJZ/UY2Vy1ccs8C+6gt9ybzKfInwJgv1 wi2kV/Q6/DoSc8dGvk0gLDUhvkeJNbmc5dQ5HQk8faLKznuH5J/PdqOsXA9lcN66 aq+hF3PXScT6/gKGiX+rOMim+fICOAOJFJUvuQgkZMuW42CpMnA=
=GLqX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)