18 ms·

Shrinkflation, SanDisk Style

343 points by hddherman 4y ago

acadapter 4y ago
Looks like it's just a way to utilize chips with defects, instead of throwing them away. Some of the missing gigabyte is probably used for a memory mapping algorithm. Anyone who has dug deeper into this issue?
- leoedin 4y ago
  The author looks at one of the drives, but they bought 2. What size was the other one? It may just be that there's some distribution of "usable flash blocks" in every flash chip, and they happened to get one which fell at the bottom end of the acceptable range. You'd have to sample quite a few before you could be certain this isn't just an outlier.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    It's clearly stated. One is 16 billion bytes, the other is 15.4 billion bytes.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      They got two new ones. But it would be very weird if different drives in the same batch had different capacities. That's a lot of wasted effort.
      - danielheath 4y ago
        Not strange at all; first they make the batch, then they test them to see how many of the bits are actually writable, and sort them according to how well they turned out. This is also how phone screens are made (a huge panel is produced, then lit up; some pixels are stuck, but phone-screen-sized pieces can be cut out of it where there's enough good pixels). This is also how most CPUs and GPU models are made - test each sub-component, disable the parts that fail testing, then price the result according to how much of it works.
        sseagull 4y ago
        Yep. This is very common and is called binning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        But they were in the same bin.
        danielheath 4y ago
        Right, but all that means is they met the minimum standards for that bin and didn’t meet the minimum standards for the next one.
    - leoedin 4y ago
      As far as I can see the author now owns 4 memory sticks, but only looked at the flash on 2 of them.
  - hddherman 4y ago
    I bought two of the same model from the same retailer and the other one reported the exact same capacity.
- Femtiono 4y ago
  Good Take. I already though it would be really weird if the flash ship is really smaller.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Which is great. And if they would have followed their own logic (1GB == 1 billion bytes) and labeled it as a 15GB or 15.5GB stick everything would be fine. I don't think memory mapping a defective stick really need additional memory, regular memory sticks already have to internally remap flash memory because of how flash memory can only delete multi-MB blocks at once.
miga 4y ago
So they need to overprovision, and compensate for effects - that is fine. However, only advertising "usable size" is truthful, everything else is misleading. It is sad that the legal system tolerates such cheating because it makes it harder to find the actual properties of the product. Or even makes it impossible to actually know how the product will actually work.
- Y_Y 4y ago
  "Up to 16GiB of storage!" It's shockingly common nowadays to advertise things with an upper limit, rather than something like expected value. They're just saying, "we won't tell you what it is, but there's no way it's more than this". Bizarre that it seems to be effective.
  - throwaway_3850 4y ago
    Bizzare that democracies can't/won't regulate this.
    - water-your-self 4y ago
      A brick through the correct window does wonders for democracy
      - zx8080 4y ago
        Probably, if by wonders you mean the wonders of a free labor in prison [0]. Otherwise, probably not wonders at all. 0 - https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-violate-fundamental-human-rights-new-report-finds https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-vio...
      - Y_Y 4y ago
        The overton window?
    - kevviiinn 4y ago
      What you call democracies are really just capitalistic governments. Why would they do that? It's bad for next quarter's profit margin
stavros 4y ago
What the hell? Why is this legal? I assume it's very illegal to say "12 eggs" and then the box only contains 9, how is this allowed?
- NKosmatos 4y ago
  The same way that unlimited data plans are capped at a few GBs/month, unlimited SMSes and minutes have limits as well, unlimited bank transaction have a limit of a few ATM transactions per month and so on…
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    My unlimited data plans have always been unlimited.
    - sneak 4y ago
      This is unlikely to be true.
    - vincnetas 4y ago
      If it's mobile data plan i think you just have not reached that limit yet. Try constant download through out the month and see what happens. I would guess the speed will go down. At least for my "unlimited" data plan there is contract clause mentioning "reasonable usage".
      - Hamuko 4y ago
        The only part about "reasonable usage" is that the ISP reserves the right to "temporarily control" your traffic once it exceeds 200 GB/month during a period of congestion "if the congestion is exceptional or temporary". If they just slapped an overall speed cap on you after 200 GB/month, they'd be breaking their own terms of service. And that's for a mobile plan. The fixed connection has no "reasonable usage" provisions and just has your generic "reserves the right to shape traffic" stuff.
amelius 4y ago
I sometimes wish a power of two didn't end up so close to a power of 1000.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I think it was chosen as it was so close to power of 1000... If you think 2^10 as unit is weird, 2^8 would make lot more sense and be quarter of 1000...
- Y_Y 4y ago
  This is a good point and feels like three kind of thing Conway would have written about. One good way to find rational approximants is to look for large values in continued fractions. Looking at log_2(10) we get the continued fraction representation [3;3,9,2,2,4,6,2,1,1,3,1,18...] The 9 isn't particularly large, but if you truncate just before it you get log_2(10) ~= 10/3 and hence 2^10 ~= 10^3. If you keep going and cut just before the 18 you find that 2^325147 ~= 10^97879 This is correct to six places, as you can easily verify $ python3 -c print(str(2**325147)[:8]) 10000003 No doubt manufacturers will use this to further swindle us as soon as we have storage that requires 40 KiB pointers.
KingLancelot 4y ago
[dead]
suddenclarity 4y ago
Any other reasonable explanations to explain a measurement error? Partitioned differently? I might be a bit too critical but it seems farfetched for me that they've withheld 579 mb only for no one to notice before. I'm predicting this will become major news on tech blogs. People love "company X misleads customers". It just seems too good to be true.
- nousermane 4y ago
  Unlike RAM, where you always get exact power-of-2 number of bits per chip, modern flash storage normally ships with defects, plus error-correction codes to deal with those. Number of defects vary. Chips coming from the same factory, even same batch, are likely to have different number of defects, and will be binned accordingly. Devices with larger (but manageable) number of defects will simply have larger ECC region reserved - leaving smaller space to show to host computer. OP's new USB stick is like that, that's it, I reckon.
  - exmadscientist 4y ago
    There's more going on here: the read and write times have also changed. This looks like a completely new hardware spin. And I'd bet it's got TLC flash now instead of MLC, or something of that sort. I hate TLC. But at least it's not QLC.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    General trick is to have NAND chips in GiB and sell product as GB. So difference 16GiB - 16GB = 1.1GiB can be used to management area / wear leveling.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Tepix 4y ago
  No, this really happens. Even if you repartition them they will not have the usable bytes they are advertised with.
satysin 4y ago
The author mentions they don’t “trust” VenToy yet (they don’t state which kind of trust) my question is why? I’ve used VenToy just fine for a while now. Am I missing something?
- theblazehen 4y ago
  In my experience, it doesn't handle "unusual" boot disks well. For example, images not using GRUB / ISOLINUX, or the usual modern windows bootloader. I've had issues with Haiku OS and Redox OS for some examples. I still keep a VenToy disk for most uses, and another one for when VenToy doesn't work
  - satysin 4y ago
    Yes I would sort of expect it to struggle/fail with more unique disc images. I only ever use it with official ISOs for this reason. If I don't see the OS listed on the compatibility list I tend to not waste my time seeing if it works or not.
- dspillett 4y ago
  I read that as VenToy being relatively new to them, compared to years of using a stick per OS, and they'not found enough time to play to prove it would work in all circumstances they might need/want it to.
  - satysin 4y ago
    Fair point. I would highly recommend to the author they take an hour and try it out. The amount of time VenToy as saved me over the past few years has to be in the 100+ hour range by now. Fantastic little tool.
- Retr0id 4y ago
  I'm not OP, but I've had all sorts of bad experiences getting "non-official" bootable USB media to work properly, in various edge-cases and weird hardware. And by "official", I mean an .iso or .img directly dd'ed onto a drive - this is the setup that I've found to be most reliable. I haven't tried Ventoy, and I suspect things are slightly nicer these days now that EFI has matured, but I'm personally not prepared to spend any longer than necessary debugging why my bootable USB isn't working properly.
paateetee 4y ago
what is wrong with using ventoy?
- ulnarkressty 4y ago
  Apparently multiple antiviruses flag it [0]. A tool that can inject whatever during the OS installation process should be closely scrutinized. Some also have trust issues with software that comes from China. https://axebase.net/blog/2021/11/12/ventoy-verdacht-auf-malware-3/ https://axebase.net/blog/2021/11/12/ventoy-verdacht-auf-malw...
  - GTP 4y ago
    Well, antiviruses usually flag also pentesting tools like nmap (this is just an example, I didn't actually test it but I wouldn't be surprised if it is flagged) because those are "hacking tools" even if they don't do anything by themselves. So it would be more interesting to know why it gets flagged, just saying that it is flagged doesn't mean much as like in the previous example, they could decide to flag something just because it is unusual.
GuB-42 4y ago
That should be illegal, they should use the same rules as for food packaging. For a 1kg bag of flour bought in the EU, that would be - On average, you should get at least 1kg of flour - No bag should be less than 985g - Packaging does not count For a USB stick, that would be - On average, the actual capacity must be no less than what's advertised - For a given product, the actual capacity must be no less than what's advertised, within a small margin - Only usable capacity counts
- josalhor 4y ago
  Totally agree. Something similar should also apply to laptops and smartphones. If your phone comes up with 30GB of bloatware on a 64GB device you should definitely not be allowed to advertise 64GB of space.
- Vogtinator 4y ago
  Please no "on average" or margins. If it says 16GB, it has to be able to store at least 16GB.
  - phirus 4y ago
    Yes, the margin for potatoes is there because potatoes are discrete. A single potatoe weighs something around 100-300 grams, so hitting exactly 1kg is not that trivial. But bytes are bytes. If it says 16GB, I want at least 16GB.
    - esteth 4y ago
      I think allowing a small margin is fair, for the same reason as potatoes. When you manufacture a module some portion of the module will be unusable and disabled in testing. In CPU-land this is done by manufacturers already - they manufacture many of the same generation of processor as the most performant version, and then test the individual items produced, disabling poorly constructed parts and downgrading the specification as they do it until they're left with a range of products at various performance points.
enlyth 4y ago
The 32GB and 64GB SanDisk variants are actually cheaper on Amazon than the 16GB one. Yes, the advertising is misleading, but OP could've saved money and quadrupled his space if he wanted to.
- water-your-self 4y ago
  Your comment is not relevant to this post.
- hddherman 4y ago
  I did not buy mine from Amazon, I was ordering other things from a local IT retailer and had room in the budget for two of these USB sticks. The price made sense in this context for me and I had little use for that extra space.
- mkj 4y ago
  Are the amazon ones genuine?
  - iakov 4y ago
    Ordering from Amazon is like gambling. Will you receive a genuine product as pictured or described, or a broken out-of-the box piece of crap? Only Jeff knows! I'd rather buy from a local electronics retailer. Sure, might be a few bucks more expensive, but at least they have a brick-and-mortar location where I can come and complain if the products suck.
    - stordoff 4y ago
      The problem I have is that other retailers tend to be more awkward about returns, whereas Amazon have never questioned them, even when the manufacturer has refused a repair[1]. It feels more like a case of pick your poison, rather than having an overall better alternative. [1] A fairly expensive pair of headphones failed 18 months into a two year warranty, but the manufacturer put it down to (IIRC) wear and tear. I contacted Amazon, and they agreed to swap them for a new pair.
timbre1234 4y ago
Sadly OP is behind the times here. The storage industry has pretty much co-opted GB to mean 1000^3 bytes, which is why you see folks in the know refering to GiB for the power-of-two-numbers. This is super-frustrating, but it's been like that for decades (literally: this was finally "officially" resolved in the late 90's by the IEC). It's frustrating that SanDisk used to give you extra bytes and they stopped -- and everyone including me HATES it when products get worse with no external indication that they changed.......but let's be honest: it's kind of SanDisk's primary MO to buy the cheapest NAND they can find and sell it on the consumer market.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Please look at the numbers in the article again. The old drive had 16 billion usable bytes. The new drive has 15.4 billion. Base 2 has nothing to do with this problem.
  - Y-bar 4y ago
    You are entirely correct, and the person you are responding to is wrong. But the author does themselves no favour by including this incorrect tidbit in the article: > [...] Operating Systems define 1 GB as 1,073,741,824 BYTES. Mac OS, iOS, Ubuntu, and Debian operating systems at the very least all use base 10 for representing disk and storage space.
    - shaan7 4y ago
      The author is simply quoting that text from SanDisk's documentation (they linked to https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/35080 https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/35080)
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      Windows uses GB (gigabytes) to mean GiB (gibibytes), MB (megabytes) to mean MiB (mebibytes), and so on because basically noone in the real world adopted IEC's renaming scheme. Linux (to include Android) and the BSDs (to include MacOS, and iOS?) use GB (gigabytes) to mean decimal GB (gigabytes), a conversion factor basically noone in the real world adopted because multiples of 1000 are meaningless. So the vast majority of people and Windows to this day understand a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, a megabyte as 1024 kilobytes, and so on. Meanwhile, Linux and the BSDs and drive manufacturers/vendors understand a kilobyte as 1000 bytes, a megabyte as 1000 kilobytes, and so on because it's pedantically correct (and the conversion factors are commercially convenient). This dissonance in understanding leads to endless "why is my drive smaller than what's printed on the box?" complaints.
zx8080 4y ago
[flagged]
- fluoridation 4y ago
  Are you also opposed to, say, regulation of impurities in drug manufacturing?
- microtonal 4y ago
  That's not socialist, that is just consumer protection. Capitalism doesn't just come in one form ('Ayn Rand'-style absolutist capitalism). Individual consumers don't have the clout to make a dent in their sales. So, you set some rules as a society (such as don't lie in the product description) to ensure that individuals have a recourse when they are scammed.
- unwind 4y ago
  I don't think it qualifies as "socialist" to require that products sold match the description. Maybe, at an extreme Mr Fantastic-style stretch, it comes closer to what many people classify as "socialist" to also require clarity in the description, i.e. the description needs to be written in a way that everyone understands it, not just the very brightest[*] readers. The same company selling such a product would not appreciate it I paid them "up to the requested amount", they want it all. Then they need to deliver what they said they were selling. I won't even get into how not requiring that completely skews the idea of competition, which capitalism is supposed to thrive on ... Okay, maybe I just did, a little. :) [*] Or "most fit", "best educated", or whatever. Talking about human intelligence is always hairy, hopefully I got the meaning across. Edit: added asterisk:ed text.
hyperman1 4y ago
I've tried to find relevant EU law about this. IANAL, of course. According to 'misleading and comparative advertising' - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32006L0114&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... - it seems this could fall under article 2b and 2c, defining misleading resp comparative advertising. The definition of misleading here is: [..] any advertising which in any way, including its presentation, deceives or is likely to deceive the persons to whom it is addressed or whom it reaches and which, by reason of its deceptive nature, is likely to affect their economic behaviour or which, for those reasons, injures or is likely to injure a competitor [..] This is a directive, unfortunately, so the actual law resides with (and is different in) each member state. OTOH, this means inhabitants might complain to their regulator, and don't need to sue sandisk themselves. I was hoping this one would help. It says which errors are allowed when measuring things. Unfortunately it only speaks of weights and (physical) volumes, not other measurements like number of bits. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:01976L0211-20190726#tocId14 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... In general, I don't have much idea about how to navigate the EU consumer protection landscape. So while I do have a lot of protections, it is sometimes hard to know which ones. Does anyone know a good site or something?
- Y_Y 4y ago
  https://commission.europa.eu/live-work-travel-eu/consumer-rights-and-complaints/resolve-your-consumer-complaint_en https://commission.europa.eu/live-work-travel-eu/consumer-ri... I think that it would be normal to go to your national regulator first if that's an option.
dark-star 4y ago
There are tools out there that let you reconfigure the flash controller to have less overprovisioning. You're losing reliability this way of course, but if you want to get exactly 16'000'000'000 bytes out of the stick there are ways to accomplish this.
- screamingninja 4y ago
  Which one would you recommend?
  - dark-star 4y ago
    it really depends on the type of controller chip that is used in the USB stick. I have used MPALL in the past, for Phison chips. Here is a list: http://thehowto.wikidot.com/flash-drive-recovery http://thehowto.wikidot.com/flash-drive-recovery Downloading the actual tools requires searching around russian and/or chinese forums though, so you should take appropriate care...
- csdvrx 4y ago
  Do you know tools to change the amount of SLC in a modern NVMe? A part of the MLC is often configured as SLC, and used for caching. I'd like to set up drives to be 100% SLC, even if it divides the usable storage by say 4 for QLC
  - dark-star 4y ago
    sorry, I haven't had the chance to play around a lot with NVMe disks yet. Let us know if you find out something!
thrdbndndn 4y ago
I'm confused by the report from F3 probe even for the "good" one. It says: Device geometry: *Usable* size: 14.91 GB (31266816 blocks) Announced size: 14.91 GB (31266816 blocks) Module: 16.00 GB (2^34 Bytes) So why it's only 14.91? I assume it uses GiB (1024) -- but then, why "Module" is 2^34 B? Shouldn't it also be 16000000000 B or 14.91 GB?
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  You still need overprovisioning on NAND flash devices.
- vitus 4y ago
  This is just GiB vs GB. The usable / announced size is more or less 16 GB (roughly 14.91 GiB), which you can also verify by multiplying the number of blocks by the block size (512B).
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
    I get GiB vs GB for usable size. I'm asking why Module actually has 16 GiB (as it says, 2^34).
    - pwg 4y ago
      Most likely they produce a flash chip with an actual 16 GiB. But to reliably use that chip in a USB flash drive, the flash controller needs both: 1) some spare blocks to use to replace blocks that fail during usage. 2) some amount of space to store its own data (spare block map, in use block map, failed block map, etc.) and the controller just uses part of the existing flash chip for those purposes. The difference between 'module' and 'actual' is likely "controller data overhead".
    - veonik 4y ago
      It's a 16GB module in the "1GB is 1000MB" sense that drive manufacturers follow-- 31266816 blocks at 512 bytes each is 16008609792.
jbverschoor 4y ago
The new one also has lower performance
- Aachen 4y ago
  Higher, I think? The nanoseconds for a write operation are 14 instead of 25. Or did I read it the wrong way around / is another metric worse? Related subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34804842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34804842
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    That's weird. You're right. Not sure how I mixed that up
AlexandrB 4y ago
To me this reeks of Western Digital style dishonesty[1][2]. I was wondering how long it would take for the new parent company to rub off on SanDisk and I guess I have my answer. My suggestion is to stay the hell away from anything Western Digital (and now SanDisk) if accurate specs are important to your use case. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets-sued-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/western-digital-is-trying-to-redefine-the-word-rpm/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/western-digital-is-t...
- deadbunny 4y ago
  I missed that WD had purchased SanDisk. Well that's SanDIsk off the list of suppliers...
  - coastermug 4y ago
    What supplier would you recommend? WD and Sandisk have been my go-to for all things storage, but I prefer to pay a premium up to 20% for better quality.
    - __alexs 4y ago
      Seagate, Samsung.
      - attentive 4y ago
        I'd go with WD over Seagate every time (for spinning).
      - sentientslug 4y ago
        There is no way you are in good faith recommending Seagate....
    - duffyjp 4y ago
      My experience with WD spinning disks has been great. I've had two Sandisk SD cards fail which was a bummer but they both went into a read-only mode so I didn't lose any photos. I've switched to Samsung's high-endurance line for those.
goosedragons 4y ago
Hmm. I also have a 16GB SanDisk Ultra made in China like the old one. I don't remember exactly when I bought it but it was several years ago. Mine shows up with a usable size of 14.77 GB (30965760 blocks) from the same f3probe command the article runs. Testing my terrible no name 16GB stick shows 14.65GB usable.
blagie 4y ago
Here's my problem: I'm glad to pay a premium for Sandisk if it guarantees reliable, honest, and accurate devices. I can buy generic flash drives for a fraction of the cost. If Sandisk is starting to cheat, why would I pay the premium? And if I'm willing to pay a premium, whom should I buy from? Sandisk, prior to WD, was expensive but honest. I was concerned this might happen, since WD has a bad track record here.
- glintik 4y ago
  SanDisk isn’t premium at all. And known for various issues.
  - brookst 4y ago
    The used to be premium? Or at least I considered them to be. TIL. Who is a good premium brand today?
    - Our_Benefactors 4y ago
      Samsung has lines that are marketed for use in security cams, these have a high read/write cycle lifetime. They’re worth it for embedded devices like raspberry pi.
      - antongribok 4y ago
        I switched to Samsung from SanDisk about 7-8 years ago (when I first discovered this cheating on one of my SanDisk USB sticks) and haven't had any issues. BTW, there is no need to buy anything fancy for RPi, I just buy the cheap stuff, but I buy much higher capacity than what I need. Overprovisioning this way is cheaper and more reliable in my opinion vs. buying something more exotic. For example for the most basic RPi install, I'll buy a 64GB microSD card. The card may only ever see less than 10 GB worth of data, but I know it'll last for years with plenty of chatty logs written to it daily. Source: I've been running RPis from the very first version, and have never had a single card fail on me, ever.
permo-w 4y ago
one thing that isn’t clear from this article is where he bought it from and what it said in the listing. all he says is that he bought one of the same size and brand. if the listing says 15gb, then I don’t see a problem. it’s up to you to see that and perhaps choose a different option
- zwirbl 4y ago
  Look at the fotos, 16GB is even printed on the stick itself. Without the 'usable memory less' clause
  - permo-w 4y ago
    ah yeah missed that. comment retracted
rvba 4y ago
I wonder why there are so few usb flash drives that have a physical "read only" lock. That was so useful to defend against viruses. A cheap flash drive will cost say 15 dollars and one with a physical button/lock to make it read only will be 150? The cost of materials should be maybe 5 more dollars... On a side note, if you go into one of those "print shops" that can print things for you and use an USB stick, then how can you sanitize your stick from the multiple viruses / worms that you will get? Only thing that comes to my mind is to use a computer where the hard drives are physically disconnected and some live CD linux. But even then it is unclear if you can really format the usb flash memory to make it safe.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  I also realized a few years ago that the physical switch on the sdcard is just a marker of intention. Hardware as well as software can just ignore it.
  - Aachen 4y ago
    I'm having trouble making my software ignore it. What command would write to the card when it has the write lock set?
    - smolder 4y ago
      Perhaps it's not within the capabilities provided by the OS or the driver, because they're "well behaved", but the position of the switch is in essence a boolean sent to the host device and not a barrier to electrical signals that would write data.
    - addaon 4y ago
      If you're on top of an OS, I can't say (depends on the OS)... but reading the switch is the responsibility of the reader, not the card. The card has no idea if it's write-protected (by the switch mechanism) or not. [1] Just using the same SPI operations you always use for write should work fine. There's not even a lock-status register or anything to check/clear first for the switch mechanism. https://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism-on-an-sd-card-hardware-firmware-or-software-driver-os https://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism...
codazoda 4y ago
This has been going on my entire career, starting in at least 1996 or so. Maybe SanDisk was an exception? People have been complaining about this for a very long time so I don’t think it’s quite right to call it Shrinkflation. But, maybe I’ve been conditioned into complacency. I do agree, manufacturers should have to post usable space. I don’t see this changing though. Edit: Removed note about 1,000,000,000 bytes. The article isn’t specifically about that, but I’m not convinced that’s ever been the only factor.
- gladiatr72 4y ago
  Yes. The tech business keeps redefining technical terms for marketing purposes, and we end up with GIBibs. Conjures images of those rusty cages they used to put people in to die..
- drakenot 4y ago
  This article was about SanDisk thumb drive having less than 1,000,000,000 usable bytes.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  What the article describes is not that. They're saying its an extra shrinkage ON TOP of the usual 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1Gb thing drive makers have already done for a long time.
- scajanus 4y ago
  The article was not about that. The old memory stick was around 16,000,000,000 bytes; the new one 15,400,000,000. So even with the 1,000,000,000 bytes to a gigabyte it doesn't round up to 16 GB.
  - gladiatr72 4y ago
    Snap. Yeah, but it's a smoke and mirrors strategy that the storage industry has been using for decades. We gave you what you paid for because we redefined what it is that you payed for.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Tepix 4y ago
I have had the same happen to me with Toshiba MicroSD cards. I ended up returning them. I also bought a Transcend 128GB USB stick, which i unfortunately did not return (yet). I have communicated with Transcend support and they said it was an issue with partitioning and filesystems - which is wrong, because the tools i use show the capacity at a lower level. They kept stubbornly repeating these statements. I may end up returning it which shouldn't be a problem even after almost 2 years because the defect has been there since the beginning. Here's what diskutil has to say about it: % diskutil info /dev/disk4 Device Identifier: disk4 Device Node: /dev/disk4 Whole: Yes Part of Whole: disk4 Device / Media Name: Transcend 128GB Disk Size: 123.7 GB (123718336512 Bytes) (exactly 241637376 512-Byte-Units) Device Block Size: 512 Bytes For comparison, i get this for a Lexar 32GB USB stick: Disk Size: 32.0 GB (32008830976 Bytes) (exactly 62517248 512-Byte-Units) You can clearly see that more than 4GB are missing on the Transcend 128GB stick. It should be around 119.2GiB (128GB) but it is 115.2GiB (123.7GB)
- duffyjp 4y ago
  I'd be curious what the output is of the f3probe tool used in the article. I assume you have a 128GB module with the missing bits used as reserve for when blocks fail. I'm fine with that if it's sold as a 124GB drive, not 128GB. I like to buy Intel drives because they'll sell you a 480GB drive and under the hood it's a 512GB module with tons of reserve.
  - Tepix 4y ago
    Sure, if they had sold it as a 123GB drive i'd be perfectly OK with it. On macOS, f3probe isn't available, i'll have to hook it up to a Linux PC.
yrro 4y ago
This is simple to resolve. If I buy a 16 GB flash drive with fewer than 16 billion bytes of usable capacity then I will demand a refund and return the device at the retailer's expense. I will also complain to trading standards.
- rfoo 4y ago
  I don't know if it is possible where you live, but can you demand a refund without returning the device? That's how people in China countered fake 2TB thumb drives on taobao. They knowingly buy the device and ask for refund (because it's fake) without returning. They have an online forum full of "which merchant is selling fake drives today". The trick is there are "Mass Production Tools" (I think it actually means firmware configurator) for the flash controller used in these scam drives, which can turn them back to their original capacity (usually 4GB or less). So by doing so they effectively win some free tiny-ish thumb drives.
  - yrro 4y ago
    In England & Wales, goods must correspond to their description [Sales of Goods Act]. If not then the seller must offer a full refund including the cost of returning the mis-sold item [Consumer Rights Act and other acts relating to the implementation of the EU Distance Selling directives]. If all or part of the payment for an item is made with a credit card then the credit card issuer is jointly and severally responsible ["Section 75"]. So if a retailer doesn't play along will find themselves answerable to their payment processor; the customer doesn't have to get involved. It's not unheard of for sellers to issue a refund and request the customer dispose of a faulty or mis-sold item instead of bothering to return it. But that's only if the customer is OK with it; if I wanted to return, say, a washing machine and the seller refused to co-operate then I'd be in my rights to dispose of it at my expense and refund the balance minus my reasonable costs to the seller.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lisplist 4y ago
Tangent, but I think the practice of shrinkflation should be made illegal altogether (although not sure how you would enforce it). If you need to increase prices, fine, but it's a complete waste of packaging materials to just give less of something for the same price in the same package, not to mention the environmental harm.
- account42 4y ago
  Reducing package size can be in the interest of the user sometimes, e.g. if most people need less or won't use the whole package in time for perishables. However it should be required to advertise the size reduction on the new packaging, including before and after price per amount.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    I find this is what supermarkets do. They sell you basil and other fresh herbs in MASSIVE packs that you will likely only use 1/4 of for any meal. The rest goes bad and gets tossed out. It's basically a scam to make you feel like you are getting an ok deal because you are getting so much. But really it is just a way to charge you more without seeming like a price raise.
mxfh 4y ago
Burying some way more interesting unnoticed metric in the logs. In practice, I would trade a ~75% faster drive for <10% of storage in a thumb drive use case with zero hesitation: Old: Probe time: 1'49" Read: 463.8ms / 4814 = 96us Write: 1'48" / 4192321 = 25us New: Probe time: 1'02" Read: 338.2ms / 4814 = 70us Write: 1'02" / 4192321 = 14us
- Aachen 4y ago
  Was thinking the same, but with it not being called out in the article at all, I was wondering whether to trust these numbers. The tool says "probe", not "benchmark". Not sure what to make of it
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  I might too, but only if I knew that's what I was doing.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  So, guess what, advertising that it's a bit smaller and much faster is probably the best way to get people like you to buy.
daneel_w 4y ago
I stopped buying WD many years ago because of their dishonest marketing tactics and, frankly, shit products.
- roeles 4y ago
  Any recommendation for reliable disks, for NAS? Or external USB? WD used to be the brand for these around 2010, according to my uni friends.
  - daneel_w 4y ago
    I've used only Toshiba drives the past 10 or so years. Not a single issue so far, so I'll happily swear by that brand. Currently I use a stack of their L200 2TB 2.5" drives because of how little power they use (<2 watts) and because of not having intermediary flash storage like e.g. Seagate's 2.5" drives do - because I'm convinced that the flash portion is just a liability which will fail sooner than the actual mechanical drive. The L200s are SMR drives so low write speeds (about 25 MB/sec seq. at worst) will occur intermittently if that is a concern.
fwlr 4y ago
It would be nice to to have something like caniuse.com or dpi.lv, but for “usable storage space on device”. I doubt it would shame most manufacturers into actually providing what they advertise, but it might just create enough visibility for one or two manufacturers to commit the extra resources to delivering on the promise.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
Aeolun 4y ago
How can SanDisk redefine a SI unit to suit them? Don’t we have GiB for that?
- kevincox 4y ago
  In theory yes. In practice GiB is rarely used and GB is widely used for 10^9 and 2^30. It's a shame, but due to the rare ruse I doubt it would prevent much confusion in practice.
Yannik_Sc 4y ago
I'd bet it's because your new one uses an MBR partition as your tools show you clearly, that indeed both sticks are 16 GB sticks
m463 4y ago
one thing I've learned - IODD is cool

343 points by hddherman 4y ago

Looks like it's just a way to utilize chips with defects, instead of throwing them away. Some of the missing gigabyte is probably used for a memory mapping algorithm. Anyone who has dug deeper into this issue?

leoedin 4y ago
The author looks at one of the drives, but they bought 2. What size was the other one? It may just be that there's some distribution of "usable flash blocks" in every flash chip, and they happened to get one which fell at the bottom end of the acceptable range. You'd have to sample quite a few before you could be certain this isn't just an outlier.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  It's clearly stated. One is 16 billion bytes, the other is 15.4 billion bytes.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    They got two new ones. But it would be very weird if different drives in the same batch had different capacities. That's a lot of wasted effort.
    - danielheath 4y ago
      Not strange at all; first they make the batch, then they test them to see how many of the bits are actually writable, and sort them according to how well they turned out. This is also how phone screens are made (a huge panel is produced, then lit up; some pixels are stuck, but phone-screen-sized pieces can be cut out of it where there's enough good pixels). This is also how most CPUs and GPU models are made - test each sub-component, disable the parts that fail testing, then price the result according to how much of it works.
      - sseagull 4y ago
        Yep. This is very common and is called binning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        But they were in the same bin.
        danielheath 4y ago
        Right, but all that means is they met the minimum standards for that bin and didn’t meet the minimum standards for the next one.
  - leoedin 4y ago
    As far as I can see the author now owns 4 memory sticks, but only looked at the flash on 2 of them.
- hddherman 4y ago
  I bought two of the same model from the same retailer and the other one reported the exact same capacity.
Femtiono 4y ago
Good Take. I already though it would be really weird if the flash ship is really smaller.
wongarsu 4y ago
Which is great. And if they would have followed their own logic (1GB == 1 billion bytes) and labeled it as a 15GB or 15.5GB stick everything would be fine. I don't think memory mapping a defective stick really need additional memory, regular memory sticks already have to internally remap flash memory because of how flash memory can only delete multi-MB blocks at once.

miga 4y ago

So they need to overprovision, and compensate for effects - that is fine. However, only advertising "usable size" is truthful, everything else is misleading. It is sad that the legal system tolerates such cheating because it makes it harder to find the actual properties of the product. Or even makes it impossible to actually know how the product will actually work.

Y_Y 4y ago
"Up to 16GiB of storage!" It's shockingly common nowadays to advertise things with an upper limit, rather than something like expected value. They're just saying, "we won't tell you what it is, but there's no way it's more than this". Bizarre that it seems to be effective.
- throwaway_3850 4y ago
  Bizzare that democracies can't/won't regulate this.
  - water-your-self 4y ago
    A brick through the correct window does wonders for democracy
    - zx8080 4y ago
      Probably, if by wonders you mean the wonders of a free labor in prison [0]. Otherwise, probably not wonders at all. 0 - https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-violate-fundamental-human-rights-new-report-finds https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-vio...
    - Y_Y 4y ago
      The overton window?
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    What you call democracies are really just capitalistic governments. Why would they do that? It's bad for next quarter's profit margin

stavros 4y ago

What the hell? Why is this legal? I assume it's very illegal to say "12 eggs" and then the box only contains 9, how is this allowed?

NKosmatos 4y ago
The same way that unlimited data plans are capped at a few GBs/month, unlimited SMSes and minutes have limits as well, unlimited bank transaction have a limit of a few ATM transactions per month and so on…
- Hamuko 4y ago
  My unlimited data plans have always been unlimited.
  - sneak 4y ago
    This is unlikely to be true.
  - vincnetas 4y ago
    If it's mobile data plan i think you just have not reached that limit yet. Try constant download through out the month and see what happens. I would guess the speed will go down. At least for my "unlimited" data plan there is contract clause mentioning "reasonable usage".
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      The only part about "reasonable usage" is that the ISP reserves the right to "temporarily control" your traffic once it exceeds 200 GB/month during a period of congestion "if the congestion is exceptional or temporary". If they just slapped an overall speed cap on you after 200 GB/month, they'd be breaking their own terms of service. And that's for a mobile plan. The fixed connection has no "reasonable usage" provisions and just has your generic "reserves the right to shape traffic" stuff.

amelius 4y ago

I sometimes wish a power of two didn't end up so close to a power of 1000.

Ekaros 4y ago
I think it was chosen as it was so close to power of 1000... If you think 2^10 as unit is weird, 2^8 would make lot more sense and be quarter of 1000...
Y_Y 4y ago
This is a good point and feels like three kind of thing Conway would have written about. One good way to find rational approximants is to look for large values in continued fractions. Looking at log_2(10) we get the continued fraction representation [3;3,9,2,2,4,6,2,1,1,3,1,18...] The 9 isn't particularly large, but if you truncate just before it you get log_2(10) ~= 10/3 and hence 2^10 ~= 10^3. If you keep going and cut just before the 18 you find that 2^325147 ~= 10^97879 This is correct to six places, as you can easily verify $ python3 -c print(str(2**325147)[:8]) 10000003 No doubt manufacturers will use this to further swindle us as soon as we have storage that requires 40 KiB pointers.

KingLancelot 4y ago

[dead]

suddenclarity 4y ago

Any other reasonable explanations to explain a measurement error? Partitioned differently? I might be a bit too critical but it seems farfetched for me that they've withheld 579 mb only for no one to notice before. I'm predicting this will become major news on tech blogs. People love "company X misleads customers". It just seems too good to be true.

nousermane 4y ago
Unlike RAM, where you always get exact power-of-2 number of bits per chip, modern flash storage normally ships with defects, plus error-correction codes to deal with those. Number of defects vary. Chips coming from the same factory, even same batch, are likely to have different number of defects, and will be binned accordingly. Devices with larger (but manageable) number of defects will simply have larger ECC region reserved - leaving smaller space to show to host computer. OP's new USB stick is like that, that's it, I reckon.
- exmadscientist 4y ago
  There's more going on here: the read and write times have also changed. This looks like a completely new hardware spin. And I'd bet it's got TLC flash now instead of MLC, or something of that sort. I hate TLC. But at least it's not QLC.
- fomine3 4y ago
  General trick is to have NAND chips in GiB and sell product as GB. So difference 16GiB - 16GB = 1.1GiB can be used to management area / wear leveling.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Tepix 4y ago
No, this really happens. Even if you repartition them they will not have the usable bytes they are advertised with.

satysin 4y ago

The author mentions they don’t “trust” VenToy yet (they don’t state which kind of trust) my question is why? I’ve used VenToy just fine for a while now. Am I missing something?

theblazehen 4y ago
In my experience, it doesn't handle "unusual" boot disks well. For example, images not using GRUB / ISOLINUX, or the usual modern windows bootloader. I've had issues with Haiku OS and Redox OS for some examples. I still keep a VenToy disk for most uses, and another one for when VenToy doesn't work
- satysin 4y ago
  Yes I would sort of expect it to struggle/fail with more unique disc images. I only ever use it with official ISOs for this reason. If I don't see the OS listed on the compatibility list I tend to not waste my time seeing if it works or not.
dspillett 4y ago
I read that as VenToy being relatively new to them, compared to years of using a stick per OS, and they'not found enough time to play to prove it would work in all circumstances they might need/want it to.
- satysin 4y ago
  Fair point. I would highly recommend to the author they take an hour and try it out. The amount of time VenToy as saved me over the past few years has to be in the 100+ hour range by now. Fantastic little tool.
Retr0id 4y ago
I'm not OP, but I've had all sorts of bad experiences getting "non-official" bootable USB media to work properly, in various edge-cases and weird hardware. And by "official", I mean an .iso or .img directly dd'ed onto a drive - this is the setup that I've found to be most reliable. I haven't tried Ventoy, and I suspect things are slightly nicer these days now that EFI has matured, but I'm personally not prepared to spend any longer than necessary debugging why my bootable USB isn't working properly.

paateetee 4y ago

what is wrong with using ventoy?

ulnarkressty 4y ago
Apparently multiple antiviruses flag it [0]. A tool that can inject whatever during the OS installation process should be closely scrutinized. Some also have trust issues with software that comes from China. https://axebase.net/blog/2021/11/12/ventoy-verdacht-auf-malware-3/ https://axebase.net/blog/2021/11/12/ventoy-verdacht-auf-malw...
- GTP 4y ago
  Well, antiviruses usually flag also pentesting tools like nmap (this is just an example, I didn't actually test it but I wouldn't be surprised if it is flagged) because those are "hacking tools" even if they don't do anything by themselves. So it would be more interesting to know why it gets flagged, just saying that it is flagged doesn't mean much as like in the previous example, they could decide to flag something just because it is unusual.

GuB-42 4y ago

That should be illegal, they should use the same rules as for food packaging. For a 1kg bag of flour bought in the EU, that would be - On average, you should get at least 1kg of flour - No bag should be less than 985g - Packaging does not count For a USB stick, that would be - On average, the actual capacity must be no less than what's advertised - For a given product, the actual capacity must be no less than what's advertised, within a small margin - Only usable capacity counts

josalhor 4y ago
Totally agree. Something similar should also apply to laptops and smartphones. If your phone comes up with 30GB of bloatware on a 64GB device you should definitely not be allowed to advertise 64GB of space.
Vogtinator 4y ago
Please no "on average" or margins. If it says 16GB, it has to be able to store at least 16GB.
- phirus 4y ago
  Yes, the margin for potatoes is there because potatoes are discrete. A single potatoe weighs something around 100-300 grams, so hitting exactly 1kg is not that trivial. But bytes are bytes. If it says 16GB, I want at least 16GB.
  - esteth 4y ago
    I think allowing a small margin is fair, for the same reason as potatoes. When you manufacture a module some portion of the module will be unusable and disabled in testing. In CPU-land this is done by manufacturers already - they manufacture many of the same generation of processor as the most performant version, and then test the individual items produced, disabling poorly constructed parts and downgrading the specification as they do it until they're left with a range of products at various performance points.

enlyth 4y ago

The 32GB and 64GB SanDisk variants are actually cheaper on Amazon than the 16GB one. Yes, the advertising is misleading, but OP could've saved money and quadrupled his space if he wanted to.

water-your-self 4y ago
Your comment is not relevant to this post.
hddherman 4y ago
I did not buy mine from Amazon, I was ordering other things from a local IT retailer and had room in the budget for two of these USB sticks. The price made sense in this context for me and I had little use for that extra space.
mkj 4y ago
Are the amazon ones genuine?
- iakov 4y ago
  Ordering from Amazon is like gambling. Will you receive a genuine product as pictured or described, or a broken out-of-the box piece of crap? Only Jeff knows! I'd rather buy from a local electronics retailer. Sure, might be a few bucks more expensive, but at least they have a brick-and-mortar location where I can come and complain if the products suck.
  - stordoff 4y ago
    The problem I have is that other retailers tend to be more awkward about returns, whereas Amazon have never questioned them, even when the manufacturer has refused a repair[1]. It feels more like a case of pick your poison, rather than having an overall better alternative. [1] A fairly expensive pair of headphones failed 18 months into a two year warranty, but the manufacturer put it down to (IIRC) wear and tear. I contacted Amazon, and they agreed to swap them for a new pair.

timbre1234 4y ago

Sadly OP is behind the times here. The storage industry has pretty much co-opted GB to mean 1000^3 bytes, which is why you see folks in the know refering to GiB for the power-of-two-numbers. This is super-frustrating, but it's been like that for decades (literally: this was finally "officially" resolved in the late 90's by the IEC). It's frustrating that SanDisk used to give you extra bytes and they stopped -- and everyone including me HATES it when products get worse with no external indication that they changed.......but let's be honest: it's kind of SanDisk's primary MO to buy the cheapest NAND they can find and sell it on the consumer market.

Dylan16807 4y ago
Please look at the numbers in the article again. The old drive had 16 billion usable bytes. The new drive has 15.4 billion. Base 2 has nothing to do with this problem.
- Y-bar 4y ago
  You are entirely correct, and the person you are responding to is wrong. But the author does themselves no favour by including this incorrect tidbit in the article: > [...] Operating Systems define 1 GB as 1,073,741,824 BYTES. Mac OS, iOS, Ubuntu, and Debian operating systems at the very least all use base 10 for representing disk and storage space.
  - shaan7 4y ago
    The author is simply quoting that text from SanDisk's documentation (they linked to https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/35080 https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/35080)
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Windows uses GB (gigabytes) to mean GiB (gibibytes), MB (megabytes) to mean MiB (mebibytes), and so on because basically noone in the real world adopted IEC's renaming scheme. Linux (to include Android) and the BSDs (to include MacOS, and iOS?) use GB (gigabytes) to mean decimal GB (gigabytes), a conversion factor basically noone in the real world adopted because multiples of 1000 are meaningless. So the vast majority of people and Windows to this day understand a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, a megabyte as 1024 kilobytes, and so on. Meanwhile, Linux and the BSDs and drive manufacturers/vendors understand a kilobyte as 1000 bytes, a megabyte as 1000 kilobytes, and so on because it's pedantically correct (and the conversion factors are commercially convenient). This dissonance in understanding leads to endless "why is my drive smaller than what's printed on the box?" complaints.

zx8080 4y ago

[flagged]

fluoridation 4y ago
Are you also opposed to, say, regulation of impurities in drug manufacturing?
microtonal 4y ago
That's not socialist, that is just consumer protection. Capitalism doesn't just come in one form ('Ayn Rand'-style absolutist capitalism). Individual consumers don't have the clout to make a dent in their sales. So, you set some rules as a society (such as don't lie in the product description) to ensure that individuals have a recourse when they are scammed.
unwind 4y ago
I don't think it qualifies as "socialist" to require that products sold match the description. Maybe, at an extreme Mr Fantastic-style stretch, it comes closer to what many people classify as "socialist" to also require clarity in the description, i.e. the description needs to be written in a way that everyone understands it, not just the very brightest[*] readers. The same company selling such a product would not appreciate it I paid them "up to the requested amount", they want it all. Then they need to deliver what they said they were selling. I won't even get into how not requiring that completely skews the idea of competition, which capitalism is supposed to thrive on ... Okay, maybe I just did, a little. :) [*] Or "most fit", "best educated", or whatever. Talking about human intelligence is always hairy, hopefully I got the meaning across. Edit: added asterisk:ed text.

hyperman1 4y ago

I've tried to find relevant EU law about this. IANAL, of course. According to 'misleading and comparative advertising' - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32006L0114&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... - it seems this could fall under article 2b and 2c, defining misleading resp comparative advertising. The definition of misleading here is: [..] any advertising which in any way, including its presentation, deceives or is likely to deceive the persons to whom it is addressed or whom it reaches and which, by reason of its deceptive nature, is likely to affect their economic behaviour or which, for those reasons, injures or is likely to injure a competitor [..] This is a directive, unfortunately, so the actual law resides with (and is different in) each member state. OTOH, this means inhabitants might complain to their regulator, and don't need to sue sandisk themselves. I was hoping this one would help. It says which errors are allowed when measuring things. Unfortunately it only speaks of weights and (physical) volumes, not other measurements like number of bits. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:01976L0211-20190726#tocId14 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... In general, I don't have much idea about how to navigate the EU consumer protection landscape. So while I do have a lot of protections, it is sometimes hard to know which ones. Does anyone know a good site or something?

Y_Y 4y ago
https://commission.europa.eu/live-work-travel-eu/consumer-rights-and-complaints/resolve-your-consumer-complaint_en https://commission.europa.eu/live-work-travel-eu/consumer-ri... I think that it would be normal to go to your national regulator first if that's an option.

dark-star 4y ago

There are tools out there that let you reconfigure the flash controller to have less overprovisioning. You're losing reliability this way of course, but if you want to get exactly 16'000'000'000 bytes out of the stick there are ways to accomplish this.

screamingninja 4y ago
Which one would you recommend?
- dark-star 4y ago
  it really depends on the type of controller chip that is used in the USB stick. I have used MPALL in the past, for Phison chips. Here is a list: http://thehowto.wikidot.com/flash-drive-recovery http://thehowto.wikidot.com/flash-drive-recovery Downloading the actual tools requires searching around russian and/or chinese forums though, so you should take appropriate care...
csdvrx 4y ago
Do you know tools to change the amount of SLC in a modern NVMe? A part of the MLC is often configured as SLC, and used for caching. I'd like to set up drives to be 100% SLC, even if it divides the usable storage by say 4 for QLC
- dark-star 4y ago
  sorry, I haven't had the chance to play around a lot with NVMe disks yet. Let us know if you find out something!

thrdbndndn 4y ago

I'm confused by the report from F3 probe even for the "good" one. It says: Device geometry: *Usable* size: 14.91 GB (31266816 blocks) Announced size: 14.91 GB (31266816 blocks) Module: 16.00 GB (2^34 Bytes) So why it's only 14.91? I assume it uses GiB (1024) -- but then, why "Module" is 2^34 B? Shouldn't it also be 16000000000 B or 14.91 GB?

rhn_mk1 4y ago
You still need overprovisioning on NAND flash devices.
vitus 4y ago
This is just GiB vs GB. The usable / announced size is more or less 16 GB (roughly 14.91 GiB), which you can also verify by multiplying the number of blocks by the block size (512B).
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  I get GiB vs GB for usable size. I'm asking why Module actually has 16 GiB (as it says, 2^34).
  - pwg 4y ago
    Most likely they produce a flash chip with an actual 16 GiB. But to reliably use that chip in a USB flash drive, the flash controller needs both: 1) some spare blocks to use to replace blocks that fail during usage. 2) some amount of space to store its own data (spare block map, in use block map, failed block map, etc.) and the controller just uses part of the existing flash chip for those purposes. The difference between 'module' and 'actual' is likely "controller data overhead".
  - veonik 4y ago
    It's a 16GB module in the "1GB is 1000MB" sense that drive manufacturers follow-- 31266816 blocks at 512 bytes each is 16008609792.

jbverschoor 4y ago

The new one also has lower performance

Aachen 4y ago
Higher, I think? The nanoseconds for a write operation are 14 instead of 25. Or did I read it the wrong way around / is another metric worse? Related subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34804842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34804842
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  That's weird. You're right. Not sure how I mixed that up

AlexandrB 4y ago

To me this reeks of Western Digital style dishonesty[1][2]. I was wondering how long it would take for the new parent company to rub off on SanDisk and I guess I have my answer. My suggestion is to stay the hell away from anything Western Digital (and now SanDisk) if accurate specs are important to your use case. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets-sued-for-sneaking-smr-disks-into-its-nas-channel/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/western-digital-gets... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/western-digital-is-trying-to-redefine-the-word-rpm/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/western-digital-is-t...

deadbunny 4y ago
I missed that WD had purchased SanDisk. Well that's SanDIsk off the list of suppliers...
- coastermug 4y ago
  What supplier would you recommend? WD and Sandisk have been my go-to for all things storage, but I prefer to pay a premium up to 20% for better quality.
  - __alexs 4y ago
    Seagate, Samsung.
    - attentive 4y ago
      I'd go with WD over Seagate every time (for spinning).
    - sentientslug 4y ago
      There is no way you are in good faith recommending Seagate....
  - duffyjp 4y ago
    My experience with WD spinning disks has been great. I've had two Sandisk SD cards fail which was a bummer but they both went into a read-only mode so I didn't lose any photos. I've switched to Samsung's high-endurance line for those.

goosedragons 4y ago

Hmm. I also have a 16GB SanDisk Ultra made in China like the old one. I don't remember exactly when I bought it but it was several years ago. Mine shows up with a usable size of 14.77 GB (30965760 blocks) from the same f3probe command the article runs. Testing my terrible no name 16GB stick shows 14.65GB usable.

blagie 4y ago

Here's my problem: I'm glad to pay a premium for Sandisk if it guarantees reliable, honest, and accurate devices. I can buy generic flash drives for a fraction of the cost. If Sandisk is starting to cheat, why would I pay the premium? And if I'm willing to pay a premium, whom should I buy from? Sandisk, prior to WD, was expensive but honest. I was concerned this might happen, since WD has a bad track record here.

glintik 4y ago
SanDisk isn’t premium at all. And known for various issues.
- brookst 4y ago
  The used to be premium? Or at least I considered them to be. TIL. Who is a good premium brand today?
  - Our_Benefactors 4y ago
    Samsung has lines that are marketed for use in security cams, these have a high read/write cycle lifetime. They’re worth it for embedded devices like raspberry pi.
    - antongribok 4y ago
      I switched to Samsung from SanDisk about 7-8 years ago (when I first discovered this cheating on one of my SanDisk USB sticks) and haven't had any issues. BTW, there is no need to buy anything fancy for RPi, I just buy the cheap stuff, but I buy much higher capacity than what I need. Overprovisioning this way is cheaper and more reliable in my opinion vs. buying something more exotic. For example for the most basic RPi install, I'll buy a 64GB microSD card. The card may only ever see less than 10 GB worth of data, but I know it'll last for years with plenty of chatty logs written to it daily. Source: I've been running RPis from the very first version, and have never had a single card fail on me, ever.

permo-w 4y ago

one thing that isn’t clear from this article is where he bought it from and what it said in the listing. all he says is that he bought one of the same size and brand. if the listing says 15gb, then I don’t see a problem. it’s up to you to see that and perhaps choose a different option

zwirbl 4y ago
Look at the fotos, 16GB is even printed on the stick itself. Without the 'usable memory less' clause
- permo-w 4y ago
  ah yeah missed that. comment retracted

rvba 4y ago

I wonder why there are so few usb flash drives that have a physical "read only" lock. That was so useful to defend against viruses. A cheap flash drive will cost say 15 dollars and one with a physical button/lock to make it read only will be 150? The cost of materials should be maybe 5 more dollars... On a side note, if you go into one of those "print shops" that can print things for you and use an USB stick, then how can you sanitize your stick from the multiple viruses / worms that you will get? Only thing that comes to my mind is to use a computer where the hard drives are physically disconnected and some live CD linux. But even then it is unclear if you can really format the usb flash memory to make it safe.

prmoustache 4y ago
I also realized a few years ago that the physical switch on the sdcard is just a marker of intention. Hardware as well as software can just ignore it.
- Aachen 4y ago
  I'm having trouble making my software ignore it. What command would write to the card when it has the write lock set?
  - smolder 4y ago
    Perhaps it's not within the capabilities provided by the OS or the driver, because they're "well behaved", but the position of the switch is in essence a boolean sent to the host device and not a barrier to electrical signals that would write data.
  - addaon 4y ago
    If you're on top of an OS, I can't say (depends on the OS)... but reading the switch is the responsibility of the reader, not the card. The card has no idea if it's write-protected (by the switch mechanism) or not. [1] Just using the same SPI operations you always use for write should work fine. There's not even a lock-status register or anything to check/clear first for the switch mechanism. https://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism-on-an-sd-card-hardware-firmware-or-software-driver-os https://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism...

codazoda 4y ago

This has been going on my entire career, starting in at least 1996 or so. Maybe SanDisk was an exception? People have been complaining about this for a very long time so I don’t think it’s quite right to call it Shrinkflation. But, maybe I’ve been conditioned into complacency. I do agree, manufacturers should have to post usable space. I don’t see this changing though. Edit: Removed note about 1,000,000,000 bytes. The article isn’t specifically about that, but I’m not convinced that’s ever been the only factor.

gladiatr72 4y ago
Yes. The tech business keeps redefining technical terms for marketing purposes, and we end up with GIBibs. Conjures images of those rusty cages they used to put people in to die..
drakenot 4y ago
This article was about SanDisk thumb drive having less than 1,000,000,000 usable bytes.
VectorLock 4y ago
What the article describes is not that. They're saying its an extra shrinkage ON TOP of the usual 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1Gb thing drive makers have already done for a long time.
scajanus 4y ago
The article was not about that. The old memory stick was around 16,000,000,000 bytes; the new one 15,400,000,000. So even with the 1,000,000,000 bytes to a gigabyte it doesn't round up to 16 GB.
- gladiatr72 4y ago
  Snap. Yeah, but it's a smoke and mirrors strategy that the storage industry has been using for decades. We gave you what you paid for because we redefined what it is that you payed for.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Tepix 4y ago

I have had the same happen to me with Toshiba MicroSD cards. I ended up returning them. I also bought a Transcend 128GB USB stick, which i unfortunately did not return (yet). I have communicated with Transcend support and they said it was an issue with partitioning and filesystems - which is wrong, because the tools i use show the capacity at a lower level. They kept stubbornly repeating these statements. I may end up returning it which shouldn't be a problem even after almost 2 years because the defect has been there since the beginning. Here's what diskutil has to say about it: % diskutil info /dev/disk4 Device Identifier: disk4 Device Node: /dev/disk4 Whole: Yes Part of Whole: disk4 Device / Media Name: Transcend 128GB Disk Size: 123.7 GB (123718336512 Bytes) (exactly 241637376 512-Byte-Units) Device Block Size: 512 Bytes For comparison, i get this for a Lexar 32GB USB stick: Disk Size: 32.0 GB (32008830976 Bytes) (exactly 62517248 512-Byte-Units) You can clearly see that more than 4GB are missing on the Transcend 128GB stick. It should be around 119.2GiB (128GB) but it is 115.2GiB (123.7GB)

duffyjp 4y ago
I'd be curious what the output is of the f3probe tool used in the article. I assume you have a 128GB module with the missing bits used as reserve for when blocks fail. I'm fine with that if it's sold as a 124GB drive, not 128GB. I like to buy Intel drives because they'll sell you a 480GB drive and under the hood it's a 512GB module with tons of reserve.
- Tepix 4y ago
  Sure, if they had sold it as a 123GB drive i'd be perfectly OK with it. On macOS, f3probe isn't available, i'll have to hook it up to a Linux PC.

yrro 4y ago

This is simple to resolve. If I buy a 16 GB flash drive with fewer than 16 billion bytes of usable capacity then I will demand a refund and return the device at the retailer's expense. I will also complain to trading standards.

rfoo 4y ago
I don't know if it is possible where you live, but can you demand a refund without returning the device? That's how people in China countered fake 2TB thumb drives on taobao. They knowingly buy the device and ask for refund (because it's fake) without returning. They have an online forum full of "which merchant is selling fake drives today". The trick is there are "Mass Production Tools" (I think it actually means firmware configurator) for the flash controller used in these scam drives, which can turn them back to their original capacity (usually 4GB or less). So by doing so they effectively win some free tiny-ish thumb drives.
- yrro 4y ago
  In England & Wales, goods must correspond to their description [Sales of Goods Act]. If not then the seller must offer a full refund including the cost of returning the mis-sold item [Consumer Rights Act and other acts relating to the implementation of the EU Distance Selling directives]. If all or part of the payment for an item is made with a credit card then the credit card issuer is jointly and severally responsible ["Section 75"]. So if a retailer doesn't play along will find themselves answerable to their payment processor; the customer doesn't have to get involved. It's not unheard of for sellers to issue a refund and request the customer dispose of a faulty or mis-sold item instead of bothering to return it. But that's only if the customer is OK with it; if I wanted to return, say, a washing machine and the seller refused to co-operate then I'd be in my rights to dispose of it at my expense and refund the balance minus my reasonable costs to the seller.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lisplist 4y ago

Tangent, but I think the practice of shrinkflation should be made illegal altogether (although not sure how you would enforce it). If you need to increase prices, fine, but it's a complete waste of packaging materials to just give less of something for the same price in the same package, not to mention the environmental harm.

account42 4y ago
Reducing package size can be in the interest of the user sometimes, e.g. if most people need less or won't use the whole package in time for perishables. However it should be required to advertise the size reduction on the new packaging, including before and after price per amount.
- kevincox 4y ago
  I find this is what supermarkets do. They sell you basil and other fresh herbs in MASSIVE packs that you will likely only use 1/4 of for any meal. The rest goes bad and gets tossed out. It's basically a scam to make you feel like you are getting an ok deal because you are getting so much. But really it is just a way to charge you more without seeming like a price raise.

mxfh 4y ago

Burying some way more interesting unnoticed metric in the logs. In practice, I would trade a ~75% faster drive for <10% of storage in a thumb drive use case with zero hesitation: Old: Probe time: 1'49" Read: 463.8ms / 4814 = 96us Write: 1'48" / 4192321 = 25us New: Probe time: 1'02" Read: 338.2ms / 4814 = 70us Write: 1'02" / 4192321 = 14us

Aachen 4y ago
Was thinking the same, but with it not being called out in the article at all, I was wondering whether to trust these numbers. The tool says "probe", not "benchmark". Not sure what to make of it
ryukafalz 4y ago
I might too, but only if I knew that's what I was doing.
marcosdumay 4y ago
So, guess what, advertising that it's a bit smaller and much faster is probably the best way to get people like you to buy.

daneel_w 4y ago

I stopped buying WD many years ago because of their dishonest marketing tactics and, frankly, shit products.

roeles 4y ago
Any recommendation for reliable disks, for NAS? Or external USB? WD used to be the brand for these around 2010, according to my uni friends.
- daneel_w 4y ago
  I've used only Toshiba drives the past 10 or so years. Not a single issue so far, so I'll happily swear by that brand. Currently I use a stack of their L200 2TB 2.5" drives because of how little power they use (<2 watts) and because of not having intermediary flash storage like e.g. Seagate's 2.5" drives do - because I'm convinced that the flash portion is just a liability which will fail sooner than the actual mechanical drive. The L200s are SMR drives so low write speeds (about 25 MB/sec seq. at worst) will occur intermittently if that is a concern.

fwlr 4y ago

It would be nice to to have something like caniuse.com or dpi.lv, but for “usable storage space on device”. I doubt it would shame most manufacturers into actually providing what they advertise, but it might just create enough visibility for one or two manufacturers to commit the extra resources to delivering on the promise.

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

Aeolun 4y ago

How can SanDisk redefine a SI unit to suit them? Don’t we have GiB for that?

kevincox 4y ago
In theory yes. In practice GiB is rarely used and GB is widely used for 10^9 and 2^30. It's a shame, but due to the rare ruse I doubt it would prevent much confusion in practice.

Yannik_Sc 4y ago

I'd bet it's because your new one uses an MBR partition as your tools show you clearly, that indeed both sticks are 16 GB sticks

m463 4y ago

one thing I've learned - IODD is cool