this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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I help out with a school activity for my kids and the organizer bought a bunch of 8 GB USB sticks off of Amazon for it, against my advice. We only needed a few hundred megs for the data, but some families had more than one kid in the group and needed 2x or 3x the data. 8 GB seemed to be the cheapest price point available in quantity at the time.
As we made the drives we found that some batches were always failing to copy properly. We then realized that it was always the batches with more data. After doing some forensic analysis, we determined that the entire batch of drives was only 512 MB of usable space, but still registered as 8 GB to the OS. Whenever the write went past that point, it corrupted files, but since the directory isn't stored in the same place, all the files would still show up in the directory list. It would only be when you opened the file that you would realize the data was gone.
I'm just glad I found it while we could still fix the problem by buying from a better source.
If anyone thinks they might have this issue in the future, or just wants to see if they might have a fake drive, GRC's ValiDrive was made specifically for this sort of task (testing for bad drives, but as part of a data recovery/maintenance task). Steve Gibson puts out quality software, and I can't recommend him enough.
Damn, Steve is still around doing stuff? That guy is brilliant.
Think I first read about him in about 1992. Some of the stuff he's written is really brilliant insight into how things work, especially storage.
Yeah, still going strong and working on SpinRite 6.1/7 to work better with modern drives. That's actually why he made ValiDrive, because he was getting reports about these kind of problematic drives.
Also, if you're not aware of it, check out his podcast Security Now, it's a good listen every week and he explains concepts in a very approachable way.
Glad to see this here! Love the twit podcasts. Fuck Amazon and their apathy around any semblance of quality control or responsibility for products they ship.
Will give a listen!
Thanks for the reminder about Security Now. That's good stuff!
There's this too: https://askubuntu.com/questions/737473/check-real-size-of-usb-thumb-drive/753161#753161
I was just going to recommend his ValiDrive. Very glad to see people appreciate him and his work. He's an absolute treasure.
His DNS checker is also excellent. And runs perfectly under WINE.
I always use f3probe when I buy a new usb drive or micro sd. I seem to have gotten lucky using Amazon in the past. It's other suppliers that I've found to be most unreliable. https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html
Yeah, at this point don't buy anything on Amazon that you want to be legit.
I need some SD cards, but I'm waiting until I can make a trip to MicroCenter. No way in hell I'd risk ordering on Amazon.
Apparently the latest ones have even more usable space within the fake size: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UsWx1iO-aeA
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=UsWx1iO-aeA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.