USB hubs are a thing I prefer to stock on, since I really often use these in my projects . Threrefore, just when I was running low on ’em, I ordered a bunch in bulk from china. Took about a month, till our slowpoke-post delivered those.
Anyway, being pessimisticby default, I started by doing an lsusb -vv on the hub device:
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Tag: scam
Scam-o-matic
Well, I’ve been scammed. You might have heard of the SD card scam, when you buy a card, and it reports to be bigger, than it actually is, and whatever you write beyond the boundary of the really available space gets lost.
I ordered a bunch of 5 microSD cards, 4GiB each, and they were a pure scam with about 115 MiB instead of 4 GiB.
Luckily, I managed to get my money back, via opening a dispute and later a claim (Scammers didn’t want to give the money back, did they?), but the cards still remained here.
To test such shitty cards there exist 2 tools: h2testw and f3. First for windows, second for linux. Thy figure out the real capacity for you. I didn’t like them, because they took ages to scan one 4 GiB card. And, they operated upon a upon a filesystem, that I didn’t like as well. So I wrote my own tool.
It’s dumb as hell, and was created while f3 was still scanning one card. And it’s a lot faster. Meet ‘scam-o-matic’.
It writes some preudorandom data to the card, until it detects something bad. Usually that happens when we reach the boundary of ‘good’, somewhat ‘reliable’ memory. Then it double-checks the region, and if everything is fine (e.g. no mismatches between first and second pass) it creates a partition table for you, with one partition that covers only working area of the card.
Now just format it, alter the type with cfdisk, and make use of it.
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