Alan Stern <stern@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What you should do is fill up the drive with known data (not just 0's > like in your dd test), and then read it back to see if the data has > changed. Using dd I found out the reason of the problem: http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/Beware-of-FAKE-1GB-2GB-4GB-8GB-USB-Flash-Drives-on-eBay_W0QQugidZ10000000000953346 http://blog.uhuru.de/?p=1080 http://projectglop.com/2007/05/14/fake-usb-memory-keys/ http://reviews.ebay.com.au/BEWARE-of-FAKE-1GB-2GB-4GB-8GB-USB-Flash-Drives-on-eBay_W0QQugidZ10000000000706427 These USB sticks are fake, and have a 1 GB flash chip, and a fake controller which makes the computer think it is a 4 GB stick. Any data written past the first 1066401792 bytes is lost, and reading any data over that boundary gives a copy of the last 2048 bytes of the real flash chip, repeated as many times to fill the whole stick. I taken one of the sticks apart. The flash chip is FBNM40A4GK3WG The controller is iCreate I5128-LG L702 CE7103 http://www.icreate.com.tw/img/PDF/i5128-L_datasheet_preliminary_v010.pdf Sorry for wasting your time. But the benefit is that now searching for the error messages that I encountered in Gmane or Google will reveal this thread with the real cause. It's only very strange that if 95% of the sticks sold on eBay are such fake's, then why noone on this mailing list about USB knew about and my Googling for the error messages didn't reveal any posts about the cause. I hope this post will fix this lack of knowledge spread. I am also very surprised that these sellers manage to get positive comments for these sticks, and the people who buy them don't notice? People don't fill them past 1 GB? If so, why buy a 4 GB stick, you could have bought a 1 GB one? And when they fail a lot of time after they buy it, when they finally try to fill it past 1 GB and actually read that data, maybe its so lot of time since they bought it by average that they think that the stick just got broken? Am I one of the few ones who tried to fill it past 1 GB on the first day I got it? -- Miernik http://miernik.name/ _______________________________________________ Ext3-users mailing list Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
