Beware of dud flash drives

I just found about this last week.

TL;DR: Sandisk changed their their USB flash drives to identify themselves as fixed disks instead of the more reasonable, and historical-standard, removable disks.

And what for? To meet Windows 8 certification.

And why is that? Because as everyone knows, Windows *even in its latest incarnation* is unable to read a USB removable flash drive that has more than one partition; but it has no problem reading *fixed disk* with multiple partitions.

So what is easier: change the code to enable reading multiple partition off removable flash drive (the code is already there anyway for "fixed disk", just the pathway to recognise or not recognise the partitions); or tell everyone else to mark their "removable" hardware as "fixed disk" so I don't have to do anything and it will just work - even if as the consequence that hardware would cause things to subtly break, including its usage on my own prior operating system?

Of course. Writing certification requirements is easier than digging through decades-old code, buried several layers deep, written by perhaps unrelated groups of persons. Better not upset the house of cards.

Funny thing is, practically any other operating system has accepted that USB flash drive can have multiple partitions for many years (regardless of how they are marked); it has become a standard trick that to hide data from windows we just create a second partition on the flash drive and put our data there. What does this tell you?

Good thing that, according to the link above (see last comment), Sandisk regained its sanity (no doubt provoked by market feedback) and restored marking removable devices as "removable". Just make sure you don't get those dud ones (marked ominously as "Windows-8 certified" or "Windows-8 compatible").


Posted on 6 Mar 2014, 16:55 - Categories: General
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