Windows 7 - memory missing from flash drive

My 8GB Kingston Data Traveler is missing 6.09 GB!

I used HDD regenerator to make a regenerating flash to repair an external drive, and i hadn't used it since. Now it tell me its only 1.91 GB in capacity , i formated it with device defaults and nothing it still remains the same.


Any thoughts or ideas on what could have happened?

Out of curiosity, where did you buy it?

If it's eBay, there's the possibility that the device is counterfeit - not actually a "Kingston Data Traveller" at all but instead a no-name device of dubious size and quality purposefully made to resemble a product from a known brand.

By some statistics, the majority of "branded" flash devices on eBay are actually fakes, though some are so good that the purchasers don't even realise because at least the size really does match what's printed on the packaging.

I have no idea whether that is really what's causing the disparity in your case but I thought I'd mention the possibility. I hope I'm wrong

Flash dies after a certain amount of time and writes to the device. All it takes is a single bit in one of the 4K pages to go bad and render an entire 512K block useless. There is no warning and there is no cure.

I bought it at FutureShop downtown Toronto in 2008.

I did use it alot when i got it to transfer large files , iso files mostly. And then later on smaller files..

Is this common with flash drives? Or its a chance you take when you buy them no matter the brand?

And I did get it for $20 CAD, so i thought that was a good deal, made me wonder why it was so cheap when other brands i didn't know of were more expensive for less space.

Transferring large files over and over again will do that. Each write takes a slice from the life. But erasing takes 129 slices. Because flash memory cannot overwrite it has to erase an entire 512K block then write 128 times to each 4K page. That is of course depending on the size of pages and blocks used, but most use 4K pages and 512K blocks.

I cannot really answer that, but it is a chance you take with them all, IMHO.