USB 2.0 Flash Drive

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Guest

Hi - I've just purchases a 1GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive for my PC running XP sp2.
When checking the available storage on it, I was dumbfounded to discover it
only had 974MB of free space! Surely 50MB is not required for File Allocation
Table (FAT) and Table of Contents (TOC). Could it possibly be faulty?
Grateful for any info. - Andrew
 
Some USB drives have encryption software for you to use if you
want to. This takes up some space. There is always 'overhead' in
every system. I don't worry about it and I have 3 flash drives.
They are handy little gadgets at times,

Your best bet is to read the info contained in the pkg. Go to
the web site of the manufacturer. Read the READ-ME files. I am
sure few here can suggest otherwise.

Doug W.
-
 
Andrew said:
Hi - I've just purchases a 1GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive for my PC running XP
sp2.
When checking the available storage on it, I was dumbfounded to discover
it
only had 974MB of free space! Surely 50MB is not required for File
Allocation
Table (FAT) and Table of Contents (TOC). Could it possibly be faulty?
Grateful for any info. - Andrew
Click to expand...

Nothing to worry about, it's the old argument of how HDD manufacture's
should describe 1KB of storage space,
WD recently settled a class lawsuit regarding this.

On July 17, 2006, the Settlement of the class action lawsuit entitled Orin
Safier v. Western Digital Corporation et al., Case No. 05-03353 BZ (N.D.
Cal) became effective.

rgds
Roberto
Click to expand...
 
You are quite correct Doug, it does have encryption software which I
completely ignored. However, I emailed the well know manufacturer who suggest
I return it and ask for a replacement - the email was signed by a so called
technical support engineer. Won't bother - it only cost £17 inclusive of
postage and tax.
Thanks - Andrew.
 
Andrew said:
Hi - I've just purchases a 1GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive for my PC running XP
sp2.
When checking the available storage on it, I was dumbfounded to discover
it
only had 974MB of free space! Surely 50MB is not required for File
Allocation
Table (FAT) and Table of Contents (TOC). Could it possibly be faulty?
Grateful for any info. - Andrew
Click to expand...

TOC is used with optical device storage.

Sandisk has a hefty amount of software provided with some of its Cruzer
models.
 
Andrew said:
Hi - I've just purchases a 1GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive for my PC running
XP sp2. When checking the available storage on it, I was dumbfounded
to discover it only had 974MB of free space! Surely 50MB is not
required for File Allocation Table (FAT) and Table of Contents (TOC).
Could it possibly be faulty? Grateful for any info. - Andrew
Click to expand...



No, it's not faulty. USB Thumb drives are like hard drives. All hard drive
manufacturers define 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, while the rest of the
computer world, including Windows, defines it as 2 to the 30th power
(1,073,741,824) bytes. So your flash drive is 1,000,000,000 bytes, which is
(roughly) the same as 947MB .

Some people point out that the official international standard defines the
"G" of GB as one billion, not 1,073,741,824. Correct though they are, using
the binary value of GB is so well established in the computer world that I
consider using the decimal value of a billion to be deceptive marketing.
 
only had 974MB of free space! Surely 50MB is not required for File Allocation
Click to expand...

There are two reasons for this. One is, as you suggest, that the file
system needs disk space itself.

The other is that there are different ways to count a gigabyte. Your
drive manufacturer counts a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes, while
Windows counts a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes.
 
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