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Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,253

Why is a pendrive reported as a spinner

Just a curiosity, but:

cat /sys/block/sdg/queue/rotational

where /dev/sdg is a pendrive outputs "1", suggesting that it thinks it's a spinner. Why?

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus Prime B450 Plus, 32Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (1 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

schard

Forum Moderator

From: Hannover

Registered: 2016-05-06

Posts: 1,961

Website

Re: Why is a pendrive reported as a spinner

Maybe a firmware bug?
Some further hardware info about /dev/sdg might help to clear this up.

Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,253

Re: Why is a pendrive reported as a spinner

No problem:

 *-usb:2
                      description: Mass storage device
                      product: Intenso Rainbow Line
                      vendor: USBest Technology
                      physical id: 3
                      bus info: usb@1:3
                      logical name: scsi18
                      version: 1.00
                      serial: 09092900230285
                      capabilities: usb-2.00 scsi emulated scsi-host
                      configuration: driver=usb-storage maxpower=98mA speed=480Mbit/s
                    *-disk
                         description: SCSI Disk
                         product: Rainbow
                         vendor: Intenso
                         physical id: 0.0.0
                         bus info: scsi@18:0.0.0
                         logical name: /dev/sdg
                         version: 0.00
                         size: 15GiB (16GB)
                         capabilities: removable
                         configuration: ansiversion=2 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512
                       *-medium
                            physical id: 0
                            logical name: /dev/sdg
                            size: 15GiB (16GB)
                            capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
                            configuration: signature=5eaa061f
                          *-volume
                               description: Windows FAT volume
                               vendor: mkfs.fat
                               physical id: 2
                               logical name: /dev/sdg2
                               version: FAT16
                               serial: ffaa-f5fa
                               size: 63MiB
                               capacity: 64MiB
                               capabilities: primary boot fat initialized
                               configuration: FATs=2 filesystem=fat label=ARCHISO_EFI

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus Prime B450 Plus, 32Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (1 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

schard

Forum Moderator

From: Hannover

Registered: 2016-05-06

Posts: 1,961

Website

Re: Why is a pendrive reported as a spinner

I just tested this with some random pen drive of mine.
The reading also comes back as 1.
I think that this might be by design as a quirk for low-quality flash memory.
See: https://lwn.net/Articles/408428/