Kingston flash drive trouble

J

John Doe

Got a Kingston 16 GB flash drive for $11 US. Uninstalled the
urDrive program and deleted the partition. Properties says free
space is 14.5 GB. I can copy small files to it, but it won't allow
copying a 7 GB file. Says the destination drive is full, then says
there is not enough free disk space.

Thanks.
 
A

Alan Larsson

Uhg. I meant "deleted the folder" not "deleted the partition", of
course.

What is the file structure?

NTFS or some kind of FAT....

might make a difference.
 
J

John Doe

Alan Larsson said:
John Doe wrote:

What is the file structure?

NTFS or some kind of FAT....

might make a difference.

Yeah, after a little research, I figured this was going to be easy
for others. My only choices for the flash drive appear to be FAT
and exFAT.
 
J

John Doe

Went through device manager to the flash drive properties. Enabled
optimized for performance instead of quick removal. Then,
formatting using NTFS was possible. And that allowed copying
greater than 4 GB files to the flash drive.

Thanks to any replies that might be in the queue.
 
P

Paul

John said:
Yeah, after a little research, I figured this was going to be easy
for others. My only choices for the flash drive appear to be FAT
and exFAT.

Recipe here, for getting "NTFS" to show up when formatting.

http://www.ntfs.com/quest22.htm

Also, see the section "drive is a fake" here, to see what kinds of
failure symptoms occur on counterfeit flash drives.

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html

"If both, format and convert fail while formatting with FAT/FAT32 works,
then the drive is a fake with a fraction of real memory only.
The NTFS file system is written into the middle of the drive while
the FAT is written to at the begin[ning] of the drive. So, if the drive
is fake then the NTFS file system is written into non existent memory..."

A popular counterfeiting technique, would be to use a 2GB flash for a 16GB drive,
being off by a factor of 8. Then, they can claim to be selling a 16Gbit drive
and catch people who aren't very observant. Apparently, there's some
way to program the controller, as to the size of flash, and that's how
the drive is made to fib about capacity. But when operations are attempted
out past the end of the physical flash chip, that's when the "stuff hits
the fan" :)

HTH,
Paul
 
P

Paul

John said:
That page is where I ended up.

Copying a 7 GB file looks like it will take somewhere around 25-30
minutes.

It should be a bit faster than that.

Paul
 
L

Loren Pechtel

Got a Kingston 16 GB flash drive for $11 US. Uninstalled the
urDrive program and deleted the partition. Properties says free
space is 14.5 GB. I can copy small files to it, but it won't allow
copying a 7 GB file. Says the destination drive is full, then says
there is not enough free disk space.

It's formatted FAT32. You'll get a disk full error if you try to copy
anything over 4gb onto a FAT32 volume.

Reformat it as NTFS and your 7gb file should be fine.
 
T

Ting Hsu

It should be a bit faster than that.

When it comes to flash drives, SD cards, and usb card readers, you pay
for performance. 7gb in 25 min is about 4mb/s, which is class 4 SD
card speeds. If you look up Kingston 16gb SD cards on Newegg, you'll
find class 4 cards for $12 while class 10 cards (10mb/s) are $20.

This is a common problem for photographers. For example, a few months
ago, I upgraded from a 32gb SD card to a 16gb SD card. Sounds like a
downgrade, doesn't it? Except that the 16gb card writes at 40mb/s
while the 32gb card only did 15mb/s. I even had to upgrade to a usb
3.0 card reader, because the fastest usb 2.0 card reader I owned maxed
out at 15mb/s.
 
P

Paul

Ting said:
When it comes to flash drives, SD cards, and usb card readers, you pay
for performance. 7gb in 25 min is about 4mb/s, which is class 4 SD
card speeds. If you look up Kingston 16gb SD cards on Newegg, you'll
find class 4 cards for $12 while class 10 cards (10mb/s) are $20.

This is a common problem for photographers. For example, a few months
ago, I upgraded from a 32gb SD card to a 16gb SD card. Sounds like a
downgrade, doesn't it? Except that the 16gb card writes at 40mb/s
while the 32gb card only did 15mb/s. I even had to upgrade to a usb
3.0 card reader, because the fastest usb 2.0 card reader I owned maxed
out at 15mb/s.

I'd try and look up the claimed transfer speed of John's flash
drive, if he'd provided a model number.

All I can say right now, is the transfer speed of around 4MB/sec
on that thing, seems slow. It should be double that, at the
very least. 9MB/sec would be a good number for a single channel
flash key. And 18MB/sec for a dual channel (two chip) flash key.

I have seen pathetic USB2 flash keys, such as one delivering only
a bit more than 1MB/sec. (Maybe around 1.5MB/sec.) But that was a
long time ago, and you're unlikely to see that in a brand new
(2012 designed) USB key.

Paul
 
F

Flasherly

When it comes to flash drives, SD cards, and usb card readers, you pay
for performance. 7gb in 25 min is about 4mb/s, which is class 4 SD
card speeds. If you look up Kingston 16gb SD cards on Newegg, you'll
find class 4 cards for $12 while class 10 cards (10mb/s) are $20.

This is a common problem for photographers. For example, a few months
ago, I upgraded from a 32gb SD card to a 16gb SD card. Sounds like a
downgrade, doesn't it? Except that the 16gb card writes at 40mb/s
while the 32gb card only did 15mb/s. I even had to upgrade to a usb
3.0 card reader, because the fastest usb 2.0 card reader I owned maxed
out at 15mb/s.

The only flash device that crapped out, all over the floor, was
Kingston's. My first and first impressions/experience. What happened
was I'd simply leave the thing plugged in for MoJo to mysteriously
appear in the NeitherWorld of SolidState. Although, to Kingston's
credit they did replace the unit (16G) promptly and largely without
pain -- I'm not actually sure with what since whatever they gave me
isn't what appears the same as ordered. For crappy "Class Standards",
I suspect, along with all my USB flashdrives, with a well-optimized
drive just prior to writing to solidstate, I can get somewhat
acceptable rates broaching 10Mb/sec. Non-photographic intents,
occasional non-networded trx <> computers, read speeds are still Lady
FutureWorld GaGa, at least for me;- wasn't that long ago the pain that
often lingers was I was writing DVDs to get something across the room.
 
P

Paul

John said:

$10 on Newegg ?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139247

Kingston is careful to not give specs for the DT101G2. But
one vendor provided some specs. So at least you can compare
and see whether you're in the right ballpark.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=DT101G2-16GB

Up to 10 MB/s read speeds
Up to 5 MB/s write speeds

I've noticed my faster flash key, is slowing down as it
gets older. So the internal errors must be catching up with it.

HTH,
Paul
 

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