The way to detect a pretend SSD or flash drive earlier than you get burned

It’s not simply on doubtful buying and selling platforms corresponding to Temu. Even Amazon will be infiltrated by doubtful sellers who promote SSDs with giant storage capacities as supposed bargains.

These cheat packs don’t come from Amazon’s personal warehouse, however from exterior service suppliers who supply their counterfeit merchandise by way of the favorable “Warehouse” offers (i.e. as returned items).

The standard of the counterfeit drives varies — from low-cost fakes to skilled counterfeits that can not be acknowledged as such from the skin at first look.

Along with real flash reminiscence media which have merely been given a distinct sticker with product specs, there are additionally fully counterfeit circuit boards with a fraudulent controller.

This rip-off will be discovered on exterior drives with a USB connection. The controller tips the working system into believing a false drive dimension, simulates write operations, however solely really shops a fraction of the info.

F3: Examine for flash drives

With Linux instruments, counterfeit or just faulty flash drives can not less than be clearly and reliably acknowledged. The F3 (Combat Flash Fraud) device can scrutinize flash drives of every kind and in addition detects delicate errors brought on by regular ageing processes.

It’s not fooled by manipulated controller chips, however empirically determines the true capability of a drive in addition to its learn and write speeds.

F3 can even test the integrity of written knowledge by writing and studying the whole area to determine outdated, unreliable flash reminiscence.

F3 is a set of command-line instruments that’s current within the repositories of most distributions. In Debian, Ubuntu, and others, for instance, it may be put in within the terminal with the command

sudo apt set up f3

For flash drives corresponding to SD playing cards, USB sticks, exterior drives with flash media, but additionally for inner NVMe SSDs, this system

f3probe

is probably the most appropriate device on this assortment of instruments. It instantly determines the true capability of a drive and isn’t fooled by controller chips.

Foundry

An preliminary take a look at can also be non-destructive — i.e. it retains the contents of a drive intact.

Like the opposite F3 instruments, f3probe requires root authorization or a prefixed sudo, in addition to the system ID of the drive, with the command

lsblk -d

The command then begins (instance)

sudo f3probe /dev/sdd

the non-destructive drive take a look at. The system should not be mounted for this.

If every little thing is okay with a drive, the device returns the under message after the test, which compares the precise dimension with the capability reported by the controller via write and skim operations:

Excellent news. The system /dev/sdd is the true factor.

Examine with knowledge loss: If the info on the drive is irrelevant, the “–harmful” parameter performs a quicker take a look at run. This additionally requires much less reminiscence, however overwrites the whole contents of the drive.

Foundry

Additionally for HDDs: Thorough take a look at

Whereas f3probe compares the data from the controller with the reminiscence addresses really obtainable on the info provider, the F3 instruments

f3write 

and

f3read 

take a extra common method.

f3write writes recordsdata with checksums to a mounted medium till it’s fully written, and f3read then verifies this knowledge.

As a result of these instruments work at file system stage, no matter the kind of disc being examined, they require partitions which can be already mounted and writable. For instance, if a drive to be examined is mounted beneath “/media/person/5EBD- 5C80/”, then

f3write /media/person/5EBD-5C80/

executes the write course of and

f3read /media/person/5EBD-5C80/

verifies the checksums of the written recordsdata. On the whole, this test solely makes use of the free, remaining area on a drive and is subsequently not harmful.

NAS arduous drives: The recording know-how is essential

The Community Hooked up Storage (NAS) system class ought to be completely obtainable within the community. The mechanical arduous drives, that are nonetheless probably the most cost-effective answer for giant NAS methods, should subsequently be capable to stand up to steady operation.

The specs of standard SATA arduous drives for desktop PCs don’t present for such steady operation. Arduous drive producers subsequently supply drives for these software eventualities with the label “NAS” and a surcharge. Nevertheless, as many customers have realized, even the addition of “NAS” is not any assure of problem-free operation within the NAS.

Solely arduous disks that don’t use trendy SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) are typically appropriate for a RAID community of any type and for the ZFS file system. With SMR, the interior arduous disk controller makes use of the disks very sparingly: Learn-write heads are aligned in order that the tracks on a platter overlap as a way to maximize storage density.

Nevertheless, this method requires a number of passes earlier than a knowledge report is reliably written and skim.

For RAID, which performs a checksum comparability of written knowledge blocks, this recording method is unsuitable and results in errors and lengthy ready occasions. The Linux kernel builders have documented the issues noticed up to now at raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Timeout_Mismatch.

In line with this, solely the standard recording know-how CMR (Typical Magnetic Recording) with linear tracks is appropriate for arduous disks in a RAID community.

Lately, the arduous drive producers Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba precipitated a serious scandal when arduous drives with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) had been marketed as NAS arduous drives with out enough labelling.

Sadly, a tough drive doesn’t even reveal by way of SMART evaluation whether or not SMR or CMR is used. At m6u.de/cmr, a NAS service supplier collects an inventory of appropriate CMR arduous drives based mostly on person info.

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