128gb Sandisk ultrafit only showing 115gb available?

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Footyslayer

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Hi everyone, today I bought a SanDisk Ultra Fit 128 GB USB Flash Drive USB 3.0 up to 150 MB/s.

Upon checking it and formatting it myself as exFAT it only shows 115gb, I spoke to Sandisk and they have said this is normal, I understand that you lose a small portion of space on USB drives but 13gb?

This seems majorly excessive! Is this normal?
 
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The only other advice I could say is try another USB device in the USB...
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dgingeri

dgingeri

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Normal. It's not a matter of formatting or overhead. It is a matter of how they calculate "GB" from the drive maker vs the OS.

Take the 115GB you see as the OS calculates the space, multiply by 1024 three times, and you get 123,480,309,760 bytes. That's their claim for the "128GB" capacity. They calculate the number of bytes per kilobyte, the number of kilobytes per megabyte, and the number of megabytes per gigabyte differently from the OS, and then round up.
 
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schwartzasher

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Basically summing up what was said before by dgingeri he means that it is fine that this happens. The os takes a little out of the flash drive due to the software built in to the USB Flash Drive to be able to run and read the flash drive. So it is fine and normal for this to happen
 
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boosted1g

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Its all in scale. I have a spanned volume (making many hard drives appear as one) of 11TB worth of drives and it shows 10TB of space.

What is on the sticker has GB as 100000000 bytes, real GB is 1073741824 bytes. Thus for every GB you loose roughly 73MB or 7%. Thus on an 8GB flash drive you loose 600MB, but on a 128gb you loose 9.5 GB from this alone.

The rest of the loose is due to partitioning and any factory stuff they have on it.
 
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Footyslayer

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Thanks to you both, that does help.

One more query though, this worked fine. I used it to transfer files between my PC and laptop. It was in for a few hours and got extremely hot, now my laptop picks up the USB drive but my PC does now, nothing at all when plugged in and I can confirm all the USB ports I have tried do work,

I cannot even see it in device manager, it also does not show in disk management,

any advice?
 
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schwartzasher

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Do you have a different computer to try it in? It may be worth also saying that it is fried
 
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Footyslayer

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Hi,

it works in my notebook but not in the main high end PC, I find this really odd. I desperately need it to work, any other advice?

 
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schwartzasher

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The only other advice I could say is try another USB device in the USB ports on the desktop computer. Make sure that it is not the USB slots. If need be also replace the USB flash drive
 
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treysis

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I don't believe 115 GB is justified by the 1000 vs. 1024 calculation! A 128 GB stick should really have 128,000,000,000 (128 billion) bytes. That is also what is advertised in the small print on the backside of the package. And that is also the way I have observed with: HDD, SSD, SD- or USB-memory from OTHER MANUFACTURERS THAN SanDisk!

E.g.: If I look at all 4 of my 2 TB HDDs, all of them show a little over 2 trillion (2,000,000,000,000) bytes. Windows will simultaneously show them as 1.81 TB because of the 1024-calculation. Same goes for a 32 GB USB memory stick I just bought from Lexar, which shows 32 billion (32,000,000,000) bytes, being recalculated to - correctly - 29.8 GB).

Unfortunately, I have observed this missing space especially with SanDisk in the last couple of years! Together with the correctly behaving 32 GB Lexar I also bought a SanDisk Ultra 128 GB. And it comes with ONLY 123,000,000,000 (123 billion) bytes instead of 128,000,000,000 (128 billion)! So, like the OP I get only 114 GB shown in Windows, while it should be really (128,000,000,000 / 1024^3) 119 GB! Now there are definitely 5 GB missing!

I can only speculate in SanDisk's favor that they need this extra space for the firmware and some sort of wear leveling. But in that case, it is still false advertisement! If they need 5 GB for wear leveling, they would have to advertise the stick with 5 GB less, even by their standards which are written in small print on the back!

I'm thinking about contacting customer care, but I believe they will just ask me to send in the stick and to refund my money. But nothing will change. I can only suggest to try other manufacturers and compare!
 
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graham.watson.23

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graham.watson.23

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Hi. You might have got an answer already but this is my solution as it has happened many times to me before. The operating system is assigning a drive letter to the device which is already assigned to another. Right mouse click on My Computer, click Manage, under Storage click Disk Management, on the right you will see all devices attached to the operating system, right mouse click on the device in question, select Change Drive Letter and Path, Select another drive Letter and then you are good to go and should then pick up the device.
 
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allanpen

May 13, 2018
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OT. Yeah that's more than our our hard drives used to be. :)

 
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