<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Like it makes assumptions about the device other than ‘this is just a set of blocks on flash memory’ and actually needs things on the disk at a file system level to be a certain way for it to work properly?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The wear leveling algorithms are usually written to assume you&amp;#x27;re using FAT32 as the filesystem and certain parameters of it, but those assumptions are optimisations for wear and speed, not &lt;i&gt;requirements&lt;/i&gt; --- AFAIK the last time I looked at this stuff in any deep detail, they weren&amp;#x27;t so crazy as to try to read the block content to determine the layout&amp;#x2F;filesystem, but those were still the days when 100k SLC was the norm and 10k MLC met with reliability skepticism.&lt;p&gt;The race for capacity means flash endurance has taken a steep nosedive with things like TLC&amp;#x2F;QLC, so if anything it&amp;#x27;s not really the firmware that&amp;#x27;s crap, it&amp;#x27;s the flash itself --- and the firmware is increasingly trying to compensate for it. For the cheapest USB&amp;#x2F;SD I think the firmware is actually stored in reserved areas of the flash itself, so any corruption has a much higher chance of rendering the device unusable.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Fr0styMatt88</author><text>That was an awesome article! The kind of rabbit hole I’d gladly go down :)&lt;p&gt;SD cards and USB sticks are just.... weird.  I haven’t delved too deeply but maybe someone here knows.... why is this? At this point I almost think of them as ‘not disks’.  The particular weirdness I’m thinking of is I’ve seen more than one drive just seem to die, just because you try and repartition them in Windows.  Not even filling the drives up.&lt;p&gt;Is it the case that USB drive and SD card firmware is just crap? Like it makes assumptions about the device other than ‘this is just a set of blocks on flash memory’ and actually needs things on the disk at a file system level to be a certain way for it to work properly? I’m really curious.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The case of the missing WAV audio files on the FAT32 SD Card</title><url>https://www.hanselman.com/blog/CSITheCaseOfTheMissingWAVAudioFilesOnTheFAT32SDCard.aspx</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>naikrovek</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve seen that happen on Mac, but not Windows, unless it&amp;#x27;s a counterfeit card.  If you &amp;quot;dd&amp;quot; to a mounted disk on Mac, you are going to have a bad time.&lt;p&gt;Also, people use &amp;quot;dd&amp;quot; a lot when all they need is &amp;quot;cat&amp;quot;.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Fr0styMatt88</author><text>That was an awesome article! The kind of rabbit hole I’d gladly go down :)&lt;p&gt;SD cards and USB sticks are just.... weird.  I haven’t delved too deeply but maybe someone here knows.... why is this? At this point I almost think of them as ‘not disks’.  The particular weirdness I’m thinking of is I’ve seen more than one drive just seem to die, just because you try and repartition them in Windows.  Not even filling the drives up.&lt;p&gt;Is it the case that USB drive and SD card firmware is just crap? Like it makes assumptions about the device other than ‘this is just a set of blocks on flash memory’ and actually needs things on the disk at a file system level to be a certain way for it to work properly? I’m really curious.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The case of the missing WAV audio files on the FAT32 SD Card</title><url>https://www.hanselman.com/blog/CSITheCaseOfTheMissingWAVAudioFilesOnTheFAT32SDCard.aspx</url></story>