Hello Peppermint people. I have an m.2 500gb memory stick, usb 3.0, that is acting weird. I am really looking for advice on how to diagnose whether or not it is any good. So the stick is formatted as exfat and I was able to copy about 150gb into it without problems. After that, anything I copy into it looks like it's being copied including taking up free space, but once I've unbooted the stick and rebooted, that last amount of data isn't there. The free space is the same as it was after copying the data. What I have been doing is backing up my Documents, Pictures, Music and Videos. I got as far as almost copying all my music and made a Video folder. Well not all of the music copied and none of the video files copied. The Video folder was still there, just empty.
So, what do you think? Are there any repair commands I can run before throwing this stick into the trash?
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You should beable to install it sudo apt install f3
It works in two stages, first it fills the drive with files to see if they "fit," and then it reads them back to see if they were corrupted or vanished.
Stage one f3write /media/user/your-usb-name/
Stage two f3read /media/user/your-usb-name/
The way you take the results is like this Success
If it says "Data OK," the drive is genuine.
Failure
If it reports "Data LOST" or "Overwritten," it means the drive is a fake or has a hardware defect.
If the drive is realy a fake, f3 will tell you exactly how much "real" space the drive has (for example ., "Actual capacity: 128.45 GB"), which can be useful if you want to re-partition it to its real size.
I ran across a few of these here in Japan and it it could be a dying USB as well.
either way I hope that helps
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Okay, I followed the procedure of the f3 program, took an entire day to complete, and it showed that of the 500gb of storage, only 150gb is usable. It was a pretty cheap memory stick but for 150gb, the price was still reasonable. We'll see how long it lasts.
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Nice...Thanks for sharing the results..,f3 did exactly what it is supposed to do, it tested the drive’s claimed capacity and found the usable capacity is much smaller than advertised, at least you know what I can do.
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Hello Peppermint people. I have an m.2 500gb memory stick, usb 3.0, that is acting weird. I am really looking for advice on how to diagnose whether or not it is any good. So the stick is formatted as exfat and I was able to copy about 150gb into it without problems. After that, anything I copy into it looks like it's being copied including taking up free space, but once I've unbooted the stick and rebooted, that last amount of data isn't there. The free space is the same as it was after copying the data. What I have been doing is backing up my Documents, Pictures, Music and Videos. I got as far as almost copying all my music and made a Video folder. Well not all of the music copied and none of the video files copied. The Video folder was still there, just empty.
So, what do you think? Are there any repair commands I can run before throwing this stick into the trash?
Hmmm that feels like a "Fake Capacity" Scam USB - that is a thing
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Fake+Capacity%22+Scam+&ia=web
There is a package you can use to test that you can read about it here
https://packages.debian.org/en/stable/f3
You should beable to install it
sudo apt install f3It works in two stages, first it fills the drive with files to see if they "fit," and then it reads them back to see if they were corrupted or vanished.
Stage one
f3write /media/user/your-usb-name/Stage two
f3read /media/user/your-usb-name/The way you take the results is like this
Success
If it says "Data OK," the drive is genuine.
Failure
If it reports "Data LOST" or "Overwritten," it means the drive is a fake or has a hardware defect.
If the drive is realy a fake, f3 will tell you exactly how much "real" space the drive has (for example ., "Actual capacity: 128.45 GB"), which can be useful if you want to re-partition it to its real size.
I ran across a few of these here in Japan and it it could be a dying USB as well.
either way I hope that helps
Thanks Peppermint OS, I'll give this a try.
Okay, I followed the procedure of the f3 program, took an entire day to complete, and it showed that of the 500gb of storage, only 150gb is usable. It was a pretty cheap memory stick but for 150gb, the price was still reasonable. We'll see how long it lasts.
Nice...Thanks for sharing the results..,f3 did exactly what it is supposed to do, it tested the drive’s claimed capacity and found the usable capacity is much smaller than advertised, at least you know what I can do.