Flash drive showing less than capacity

ellectrastar

I bought a 64gb flash drive. When I plug it in it shows as having 57.6gb free of 57.6gb. Why is this and where is the other six and a bit gb?!

DullGreyGuy

Its normally two factors:

1) Manufactures often take 1GB to be 1,000,000,000 bytes whereas computers consider 1,073,741,824 bytes to be 1GB... effectively a metric -v- imperial type issue

2) There are various areas of the storage which are blocked off for holding the index of where different files are being stored, what partitions there are etc 

Ayr_Rage

What does File Explorer show as loaded on the drive?

What is reserved when you use Disk Management?

Vitor

Worth testing it's actual capacity, lot's of fakes in the market.

mta999

you could try formatting it. Also view hidden files - maybe a recycle bin?

bob2302

If you allow for the fact the MS displays GiB values as GB, the missing space is 2.0 GiB. This is too big to be an [ex]FAT formatting overhead.

The most serious fakery involves reporting a made-up size that's much larger than the actual storage available, but I guess it's possible that this came from a bad batch, and was formatted 2GiB smaller to give an adequate amount of overprovisioning. In that case reformatting would be a bad idea.

Exodi

bob2302 said:

If you allow for the fact the MS displays GiB values as GB, the missing space is 2.0 GiB. This is too big to be an [ex]FAT formatting overhead.

The most serious fakery involves reporting a made-up size that's much larger than the actual storage available, but I guess it's possible that this came from a bad batch, and was formatted 2GiB smaller to give an adequate amount of overprovisioning. In that case reformatting would be a bad idea.

I'm in two minds, because you're right, 2GB is too much for reservation, however while I can understand the motivation for nefarious sellers to sell dodgy 128TB usb sticks for £20, it seems pointless to exaggerate the capacity by just ~3%. Maybe a minor error, as you say.

With that said, I actually believe the OP has their answer, @DullGreyGuy covered it perfectly. They're asking why they're not getting 64GB, not why are they not getting ~59.6GB. The missing 2GB is a fair discussion, but it's probably beyond what the OP needs.

Anyone that has bought a laptop/usb stick/hard drive/etc quickly realises you always lose a bit.