I have purchased 3-packs of Emtec 32 gb drives, found them on sale in a wally-world kiosk a few years back for 10 bucks, cheap enough to be worth trying, and they've been flawless...

Thanks for the tip. I'll probably buy a pack to see how they compare, performance-wise, to the Micro Center flash drives.

lsblk
# Plug in the flash drive
lsblk
# Look for a device that has just appeared
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb 

Make SURE of=/dev/sdb points to the new device *before* pressing enter!

I've been burnt enough times to check, recheck and triple check dangerous commands.

sudo wipefs --all /dev/sdb 

only wipes all signatures on that disk.

to wipe a disk completely:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb

as root user! And be pretty sure what you do, any targeted disk will be written to, so know that your device is /dev/sdb. You may check with lsblk

Then, when you use a tool like cfdisk or sfdisk or any fdisk, you are going to partition a disk. You then want to install a filesystem on a partition, not the whole disk!
Example:

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1

sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sdbn (n=your new partition number, i.e. /dev/sdb1)

You can format a complete device without any partition on it like /dev/sdb for special uses. This reminds us of olden times when we used floppy disks.

Man pages are there to help!

Couldn't you just wipe the whole thing and re-format it?

I tried doing that. I wiped the drive using the command wipefs --all /dev/sdb and created a new partition using cfdisk (and later sfdisk). I then attempted to format the partition using mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb, and that failed (multiple times). These drives are going back to Amazon.

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/

it is bit tricky to funciton on linux

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/sd-mem … for-linux/

( manual)
https://www.sdcard.org/pdf/SD-Card-Form … -v1.04.pdf

Look at the whole device in hexedit to see if there's any code at the beginning.

I did that last night. Fortunately, I didn't see anything suspicious. Mostly just lots of zeroes.

The slower Lexar JumpDrive definitely seems flaky. This morning I ran fdisk -l /dev/sdb to give it a quick look and got "Permission denied". So I tried again as root and it still didn't work. Then I tried sudo wipefs --all /dev/sdb, and that got things working again. Even so, this doesn't seem like a good sign. I have strong suspicion that this drive is going to be unreliable or end up dying early. I still have time (a few days) to return the drives for replacement or a refund, so maybe I should go ahead and do that.

Got another 64G drive by Kingston (bought together with the first one), that one came preformatted as FAT32 instead of ExFAT for some reason... Strange.

Here is another good page on the subject of fake flash drives: https://rmprepusb.com/tutorials/007-all … sh-drives/ .

I think I may have seen similar on a 128 or 256G and didn't think much about it before I re-partitioned. Or I could be imagining it. FWIW, my 128 and 256G sticks suck compared to 32. They're s - l - o - w.

I read about micro-sd cards hidden inside usb sticks. Last time I looked at them in the store, they had combo packs with "USB and micro-sd". They no longer hide the micro-sd - they let you insert it into the usb housing yourself.

A check if the memory on the stick really is the advertized one can be done with the f3 utility.

Yes, I did that for the three Lexar drives. I didn't do that for the Silicon Power drive because I didn't have time, but I will. However, that is not my main concern. At this point, I am mainly concerned about the "weirdness" of the Silicon Power drive.

I consider all "foreign" (new to me) flash drives as potentially hostile hardware. Because of that, the unusually large amount of "empty" space before the first (and only) partition of the Silicon Power drive is concerning. Could there be malicious code hiding in there?

Since I was planning on doing it anyway, I am going to go ahead and wipe the drive. I will then format it and use f3 and flashbench to conduct some tests on the drive. Oh, and as a precaution, before doing that I will use dd to back up the MBR and partition table in case I need (or want) to restore them for some reason.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/07/failed_usb_sticks

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/rejected-chips-hidden-microsd-cards-plague-the-usb-stick-market/

https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,26762.0.html

https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,26778.0.html

.