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by yrro 1157 days ago
Unless that was an mtd device then you weren't really writing to the raw device
1 comments

It did show up as sda.. can mtd devices show up as MTD, i thought it had to use some "MTD" app to transfer files to it.
You might be thinking of MTP, used by eg. phones that don't present a block device over USB so that they can internally use a filesystem not supported by Windows; MTP is a higher-level interface more akin to a network file system protocol.

mtd is a Linux driver subsystem for accessing raw NAND or NOR flash devices that don't have an SSD's Flash Translation Layer (FTL) in front of them to provide features like wear leveling. It's most commonly encountered in embedded systems.

You are correct, I was thinking of MTP.

Thank you for the education.

As I understand it there is a controller on your device that emulates a disk drive. The controller is accessing the raw device on your behalf and _should_ not be overwriting any sensitive/forbidden areas of the flash that might brick the device.