Today I bought a new SanDisk 64 GB USB memory stick.. When I connected it to the computer it shows only 57.2 GB . Where the 6.8 GB disappeared?
Why my 64gb sandisk Pendrive show 57.2gb? Why is the actual storage capacity of the product slightly less than the volume specified on the product's package?
@samy , You might want to try the Gibson Research ValiDrive utility to check that USB drive. It is freeware, and I check all of my flash drives with it after purchasing them. Please share the results with us. Have a great day. Regards, Phil
I thought they were going to stop hard drive manufacturers from continuing to use the measurements that they do. In any case... Why does my hard drive report less capacity than indicated on the drive's label? | Seagate US
I have never heard or read that. Nor do I see how they could. The HD makers are not wrong. In fact, if you read your own article, basing sizes on the decimal system, instead of the binary system, makes more sense in terms of user understandings. Having said that, using different values (1000 for kilo vs 1024 for example) is not the only reason drives show different values for space. Some of that space is used for drive mapping. Once the drive is formatted, some of the space is used up. It is like file folders in a file cabinet. You could put more sheets of paper in each drawer if you didn't have a bunch of folders in there too. But the folders are needed to keep related sheets of paper (parts of the same documents) together to make them easier to find.
Apart from small reserved space for bad blocks, "mapping" is the OS job. Specifically filesystem part of OS. It affects free space, but should not affect reported total space.
As part of mapping, I also mean the file tables and file system created when the drive is formatted. These take up space even when no files have been saved to the drive.
They are different units. 64 GB is gigabytes. 57.2 GB is gibibytes. GiB. Microsoft creates confusion by calling it GB when it is really GiB. Also, I have an empty SSD which shows 117.38 GiB of Free Space. (Using TereByte Unlimited Partition Work) An NTFS partition is created and the partition size is 117.38 GiB. The same size as the previous Free space. The formatted partition contains 114.93 MiB of Used space and 117.24 GiB of Free space.
I think Microsoft is trying to avoid confusion. GiB is not commonly used by the entire scientific community. The problem really stems from the fact that 1 kilobyte is expressed by the different disciplines in different ways. For example, the communications, electronics and physics sectors use decimal system's metric units. The information technology and data storage industries tend to use the binary system and its non-metric units. Microsoft did not dictate how it was done. That was established before Microsoft's time. I note hard disks have been around since the late 1950s.
Hi Phil 1.I tested the new (empty) 64GB USB drive using the ValiDrive. It shows 61.5 GB. On the desktop I got 57.2GB 2. I also tested an old Sandisk 32 GB USB drive. ValiDrive shows 31.4GB. On the desktop I got 7.50 GB free of 29.2 GB. On this drive I tried to add a file sized 5.2 GB and got a windows "file too large". I checked the size of the drive contents (files and folders) using "Properties". I got 21.7 GB.
As Brian said is is filesystem limitation and probably nothing is wrong with USB drive in that regard. Format it using exFAT or NTFS. It will destroy files so be sure to move them to other storage beforehand. I would suggest exFAT as it does not have journaling which improves performance and decreases write operations.
In my experience I have found exFAT to be slower than NTFS. It possibly could depend on the device. I would test both and settle on the one that provides better results.
@samy Thanks for sharing your ValiDrive results with us. Reading through this topic, I see that you are getting excellent advice, so I will bow out. Have a great day. Regards, Phil
Samy, some maths to keep us entertained. A MBR disk is limited to 2^32 sectors. So if you have 512 byte sectors the maximum disk size is 2^32 * 512 which is 2,199,023,255,552 bytes. That is 2 TiB or about 2.2 TB. But what if the sectors are larger? Disks with 4K Native sectors, eight times larger than 512 byte sectors, can have a maximum MBR disk size of 16 TiB or about 17.6 TB. They still have 2^32 sectors.
I've always been interested in maths. When I did celestial navigation years ago, I had to learn spherical trigonometry. We didn't do that at school.
