ext3 / ext4 on USB flash drive?

[Mark Ballard]

>From the little I have heard about control systems for cars, which was
some years ago, they were blockhead proprietary. The analogy would
only work if computing was customarily blackbox technology, which it
isn't. I'd be surprised if there were any branded flash drives that
contained less than their advertised amount of storage.

That leaves the question of what is going on under the hood in what is
probably the vast majority of devices where the flash isn't
fraudulent. And whether my system handles it correctly. My system
leaves me with no idea of either (though my hope holds out for some
tools I bookmarked recently). Reference to forums and specialist
websites gives genuine cause for doubt. Yet I thought it was usual for
system software to have a good angle on how its hardware was
constructed and what it was doing. I thought they worked in symbiosis,
and that this maintained by mutual necessity. I thought the symbiosis
was kept unassailably whole by a common purpose: the user.

What you say implies that this symbiosis has been broken by the
commercial greed of flash manufacturers. Or that it is by neglect on
their part, or lazyness, or some other cause of a fissure in industry
relations.

Whatever the reason, it raises another question, and that is what must
be done so that I can simply format my USB without a concern and get
back to my work.

> even for a non-fradulent USB stick or SD card, there is no single way to measure "FTL quality".  ... there are some things (such as the erase block size) which would be useful for tuning file system performance.  And the technical people I've talked to at various Flash manufacturers all agree it's pointless to hide this information, but
the product managers tend to be the roadblock.
>

This is perhaps telling. One would imagine the USB Industry Forum
meeting the Association of (File) System Software Scribes or whatever
at routine collegiate meetings in Las Vegas hotels, and so on.

Which flash manufacturers have refused to collaborate? Why has the
fabled industry forum failed?

mb.