Unique IDs of Pen Drives

Question

There are 5 pen drives of same make and model. Once they are formatted, it becomes difficult to decide which one belongs to whom. Is there anything unique about pen drives like firmware kind of thing which can establish their unique identity? If so, how can it be discovered? Is it possible to update/modify the firmware to give it a unique personal unique identity.

Answer 1

Try running

sudo blkid

on the command line while more than one being plugged in. The partition/volume should have a unique identifier.

Alternatively, you could also use the device serial, if provided by the manufacturer.

Run lsusb -vvv and identify the device, then look for the iSerial field, e.g.:

Bus 004 Device 005: ID 059f:1049 LaCie, Ltd rikiki Harddrive
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  [...]
  iManufacturer           2 LaCie
  iProduct                3 Rikiki USB 3
  iSerial                 1 00000000d49425f030b6
  [...]

Answer 2

You could give each drive a label. Most filesystems support labelling and you're most likely using FAT32 or EXT3/4 which both do. When a partition has a label, Ubuntu will use that to identify the mount.

In both cases you'll want to unmount (not eject) each device before you start and replace /dev/sdxN with the actual partition name and my_label with whatever you want to call it. I would avoid spaces for safety.

For FAT32

sudo mlabel -i /dev/sdxN ::my_label

For EXT{2..4}

sudo e2label /dev/sdxN my_label

And if you're not a fan of the command-line, install GParted and use that. RIght click the partition, click Label and away you go.

Answer 3

While formatting the drives, you can give them a unique label so that you can distinguish them after.

The other option is to use blkid to get each drive's unique identifier.