Submitted by darthatheos t3_10fh89a in technology
praecipula t1_j4yu8ri wrote
The worst thing about this is that the drive usually has the worst kind of fails-silently behavior. It's too expensive for your computer to read every write so it trusts the drive controller to give accurate reports of its size and remaining capacity. Other than that, unless the drive reports an error it looks like a good write. Finally the drive needs to actually accept filesystem recordkeeping to show it can manage the filesystem, or it it's an obvious disk formatting error.
This means writing more than 64gb (or whatever true size it is in the drive) will have the drive say, "sure thing, OS, the write was fine" and even updates the file record to show a file of the right size is there but the data for the file actually goes... nowhere. Into the void. Silently. Until the user looks for it. I was curious about this scam back in the day and replicated the behavior with badblocks
on Linux on a similar disk.
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