Difference between of=/dev/sdx and of=/dev/sdX when using dd command on Debian 10 Live USB

Question

I am using a Mac, booting in efi mode a Debian 10 live usb that I created. In live mode, I am attempting to create a FreeBSD install usb by downloading it and dd’ing it to another usb stick. Before doing so, I want to make sure my usb stick is zeroed. While zeroing my usb stick I noticed a difference in output from dd when using a capital “X” when referencing the drive /dev/sdX, and a lower case “x” when referencing the drive /dev/sdx I cannot find much information on case sensitivity in Debian using the dd command, and what the difference is between sdX and sdx when referencing drives.

Why do I get different outputs in the dd command when using of=/dev/sdx vs. using of=/dev/sdX ? For example, as referenced in the Imgur pic link, I will use the following example in Debian live:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M conv=noerror status=progress && sync
15618539520 bytes (16 GB, 15 GiB) copied, 1067 s, 14.6 MB/s
dd: error writing ‘/dev/sdC’ : No space left on device
14901+0 records in
14900+0 records out
15623782400 bytes (16 GB, 15 GiB) copied, 1125.46 s, 13.9 MB/s

But if I do the command using of=/dev/sdC on the same usb drive, I get different results such as in the (2nd) example:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdC bs=1M conv=noerror status=progress && sync
11725956096 bytes (1.7 GB, 1.6 GiB) copied, 3.3301 s, 575 MB/s
dd: error writing ‘/dev/sdC’ : No space left on device
1825+0 records in
1825+0 records out
1913491456 bytes (1.9 GB, 1.8 GiB) copied, 3.3301 s, 575 MB/s

Could someone please explain this phenomenon to me? What is the difference between the drive /dev/sdC and /dev/sdc?

Answer 1

dd doesn't care about case, that's up to the filesystem and kernel. And on Debian that'd be case-sensitive. So where /dev/sdc might have been a device node, /dev/sdC probably didn't exist until dd created it, as a regular file sdC inside /dev. /dev is probably a tempfs:

% df -hT /dev
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev           devtmpfs  440M     0  440M   0% /dev

And its size is usually limited to a fraction of RAM (default of 50%, I think).

So dd of=/dev/sdC created a file called sdC on a tmpfs filesystem, and then proceeded to fill it to the limit. You probably ~2GB of RAM being used for nothing (so maybe 4 GB RAM total?).

dd of=/dev/sdc wrote to the device, and filled it. Sherlock Holmes tells me that's a 16GB disk.