Flash drive size misrepresented

[ellenc]

I recently bought several Kingston "8G" memory sticks. I want to back up a single folder that is about 8G. I got a message that 8G won't fit on the stick; the available size was only 715G. This is so very aggravating. I'll have to return the drives, as their properties are misrepresented. I shouldn't have to use 16G sticks when I don't need that much space -- just 8. Thanks for your thoughts. ellen

 

[Berton]

USB Thumb/Flash drives are usually formatted as FAT32 which has a limit of 4GB size for a single file, NTFS-formatting does not have that limit.

All drives when formatted will not deliver the advertised size, depends upon how the vendor describes what a MB or GB is, an example is my 250GB Western Digital HDD which shows total capacity of 249,954.202,752 Bytes which converted to GB is 232GB [divide the number of Bytes by 1024 or multiples of 1024]. The 250GB before formatting shows an apparent loss of 18GB after formatting. I have a 32GB drive that shows only 29GB capacity. Or in other words your Thumb/Flash drives appear to be quite normal.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I've got a Kingston 8 GB USB stick attached right now. Capacity shown as 7.44 GB.

It's also possible that you got a counterfeit, not a legitimate Kingston product--depending on where you bought it. I've heard there are such things, although I've never encountered one.

 

[LMiller7]

Drive manufacturers usually advertise capacity defining 1 GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes while in Windows it is 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 1073741824 bytes. Do the math and an 8 GB drive has a real capacity of about 7.45 GB. With NTFS the reported size of a folder is at best only an approximation. There are many complicating factors that make this so. It is not that Windows is lying, the problem becomes: what is the truth? There are many equally valid answers that can produce quite different results.

A drive from a different manufacturer will likely have much the same capacity.

Edit:

It's also possible that you got a counterfeit, not a legitimate Kingston product--depending on where you bought it. I've heard there are such things, although I've never encountered one.

Unfortunately, counterfeit flash drives are becoming quite common in the larger sizes (32 GB and up). This has become a real problem for outlets like eBay, particularly with sellers in the Orient. Typically a small drive is altered to show a much larger capacity than it actually has. In some cases drives are used that have failed manufacturers testing and have been scheduled for destruction but have been sold by dishonest employees. The packaging of fakes is often very convincing.

This is for interest only. It is unlikely the cause in this case.

 

[Berton]

Came across a couple of boxes of floppy disks, looks like that was the last time the formatted size was printed on boxes.
These floppies show 2MB but formatted as 1.44MB.

 

[TheCoolBean]

so is there a fix for this probblem?

i would like to repair this thmb drive, ie find out its actual capacity and then format it to that size.

 

[LMiller7]

Welcome to the forum.

What problem do you have?

 

[TheCoolBean]

I've got a thumb drive that supposedly is 1tb in size, I know that is wrong however formatting doesn't help, I would like.to know if there is any way, to find out the actual size and repartition and format it to that

 

[Schrade]

Not entirely accurate there Berton; I got an old Maxtor 30G EIDE, that shows up in Linux as 31G (formatted NTFS).

Although actual usable space, usually LOWER, seems proportionate - 2 x 8Tb's = 745G, 6 Tb = 560G, 2 x 5Tb's = 466G, etc., ...

It has intrigued me since day 1...

 

[RolandJS]

If memory serves me, a 1TB HD often formats down to 930-931GB, my 1TB has two 465GB partitions; the formatting, the housekeeping, takes some of the byte-space.

 

[jumanji]

I've got a thumb drive that supposedly is 1tb in size, I know that is wrong however formatting doesn't help, I would like.to know if there is any way, to find out the actual size and repartition and format it to that

Manufacturer? Model Name/number? Why are you not giving these details for us to check?

Wherefrom did you buy the 1TB flash drive and at what price? Did you buy it because it was cheap?

Does it carry the manufacturer's warranty? If you buy a genuine flash drive and if it is faulty, the manufacturer will replace it under warranty. If you bought a fake drive you lost your money.

Download and test your flash drive with H2TestW. If it is a fake drive return it to the vendor and try to get back your money ( oftentimes impossible ).

Testing your 1tb flash drive:

Download and extract h2testw_1.4.zip from H2testw Download

Plugin only your 1TB flash drive ( Please remove all other external drives/Flash drives from your PC so that you do noet accidentally run the test on a wrong drive)

Right click on h2testw.exe and run as administrator. Choose English Language.

Click on Select target and choose your 1TB flash drive. Select all available Space and then click on Write+ Verify. Wait until it finishes scanning the available space on your flash drive.

You will now know the actual capacity of your drive.

If you are unable to run the test, your 1TB drive is already dead.

 

[torchwood]

base explanation -

The SSD/HDD manufacture always calculate in Gigabytes (mathematical base 1000) whereas Windows calculates in GibiBytes (mathematical base 1024).

Therefore 240 GB = 240,000,000 bytes = 228,9 GiB.


note you will also find a disclaimer on the packaging
some of the listed storage capacity is used for formatting and other purposes,

So basically even before you start youv'e lost 2 chunks of space.
(my 525 ssd comes back as 488)

Roy

 

[HAVOC]

I've got a thumb drive that supposedly is 1tb in size, I know that is wrong however formatting doesn't help, I would like.to know if there is any way, to find out the actual size and repartition and format it to that

There are many utilities that will write/erase a thumb drive to figure out the correct size. This is useful to see if the drive is fake. Do a google search for "fake thumb drive test". I have no experience with these tools so I can't help in recommending which one to use.

 

[Megahertz07]

As Jumanji mentioned, there are many high capacity USB flash drives that are fake.
I once bought a 64G that was only 2G.
Use the H2testw to find out the real capacity.