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by ssl-3 877 days ago
How does a storage device shrink in capacity, and by what mechanism is that shrinkage communicated with the filesystem?
1 comments

That's determined by the firmware and the manufacturer.

Flash isn't like disks. You don't write to a block that's on a certain cylinder on a certain platter. You write a block and the memory controller determines where it will be stored, usually based on some wear leveling algorithm.

It's one of the reasons you can't securely delete a flash drive.

The question remains.

Handwaving about how flash is different than disks isn't an answer to how shrinkage is conveyed to the filesystem (and isn't a meaningful differentiator anyway, since common spinny-disks haven't been 1:1 mappings for well over 3 decades, themselves).