why is my flash drive only 28 GB when it should be 32GB

poppellerant

It's for same for any disk - the formatted capacity will always be lower than the stated capacity. Part of this is because to me and you 1 kilobyte (1 KB) is 1,000 bytes - but to a computer it's 1,024 bytes.

So the manufacturer hasn't really done anything wrong by selling you a 32 GB drive, which is 32,000,000,000 bytes - but when you divide this by 1024 a few times, which is how computers work, you actually end up with 29.80 GB. Take a little bit more space off for the partition table and you end up with a poultry 28 GB.

Don't worry, it gets worse the bigger the drive you have. I have a 128 GB USB stick - after I've formatted it, I can only use 119 GB of it.

bod1467

Likewise I once had a 120GB HDD which reported in Windows as 111GB.