When is a memory stick full?

Jolly_Roger · 23 December 2009 at 9:27AM

No. I usually use the shut down icon, but there might have been an occasion when I didn't. Who knows? But thanks for your help.

Blackhat5_2 · 24 December 2009 at 10:05AM

This could be to do with cluster size. This varies considerably depending on whether you have formatted as FAT16 (sometimes just referred to as FAT), or FAT32.

Also, sometimes you get a choice of cluster size, at other times there is only one option. For instance a FAT16 formatted 512Mb disk has 16kb clusters.

What this means is that a 1 byte file will use up a minimum disk space of 16kb i.e. one cluster. And a file which is 1 byte larger than 16kb will take up two clusters i.e. 32kb.

I believe that Windows will report the sum of the file sizes, not the sum of the disk space used. And that could be your problem: free space is probably calculated by substracting that figure from the maximum capacity of the disk. So you appear to have free space when there are in fact no free clusters left on the disk.

Did you happen to have a lot of small files on your USB keys?

Dave