[Discuss] usb thumb drive

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

I got a new thumb drive, and I decided to check it out on my linux box
before using it.  Fdisk shows this:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *        8064    31293439    15642688    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

I thought the start block being so high we sort of odd.  I know that the
version of fdisk with Fedora 16 seems to be showing more than it used to
(i.e., the start block is usually now 2048 instead of 0, I'm assuming
that means it is representing the MBR where it did not in the past).

So I created a new partition, just hit return for all defaults, and got
this:

/dev/sdb2            2048        8063        3008   83  Linux

So the 2048 start block is what I expect.  If my calculations are
correct, this drive has 1909 blocks / MB, so there appears to be about
3MB of unused space before the first partition.

Using dd to copy this sdb2 device to a file then opening it in a
hex-editor shows that the partition is all zeros.

Is there a legitimate reason for what I'm seeing?  Are they just leaving
some space for re-mapping bad sectors?  Why not do that at the end of
the drive?

Thanks,
Matt