32 GB Thumbdrive claims it's full; 12 GB free??

[stultus]

I have a 32 GB, FAT32-formatted thumb drive. I'm loading it up with media for travel, but it claims it's full when it still has 12 GB free. There are fewer than 30 files on the device (with long filenames). Can anyone explain what's going on here? Is this a FAT32 issue? I read that NTFS on a thumb drive is not recommended.

 

[Kamorithm]

How big is the file you are trying to write to the Thumbdrive?

You cannot write a single file which is over 4GB in size to a FAT32 formatted drive.

Mike

 

[santz]

How big is the file you are trying to write to the Thumbdrive?

You cannot write a single file which is over 4GB in size to a FAT32 formatted drive.

Mike

This

 

[stultus]

Aha. So I must reformat it NTFS to put on a movie? Is NTFS recommended?

 

[corkyg]

NTFS will work OK as long as you don't need to make it bootable.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/247658-32-16gb-flash-drive-formatted-ntfs-questions

 

[0roo0roo]

ntfs works, but isn't recommended because of its file journaliing and all the extra writes or whatever. but i guess it doesn't matter that much. you sure its a 32gb drive? you verify the data integrity? some cheap drives are fakes

 

[lxskllr]

Aha. So I must reformat it NTFS to put on a movie? Is NTFS recommended?

I'd compress the movie to make it fit. There's no reason a movie has to be bigger than 1gb for traveling.

 

[soccerballtux]

I'd compress the movie to make it fit. There's no reason a movie has to be bigger than 1gb for traveling.

if your netbook can hardware accelerate 1080p like mine can, then sure there is./brag

 

[corkyg]

You can turn journaling off for any drive under Command Prompt, as Administrator with this command:

fsutil usn deletejournal /d c: (Substitute C: for whatever letter it is.

Go ahead and do NTFS. With 32 GB it should not be a problem.

 

[Fox5]

I found NTFS to be faster on a flash drive, because windows automatically enables write caching for a flash drive with NTFS (which also greatly cuts down on writes, NTFS isn't going to kill the flash drive and should be faster).

 

[Red Squirrel]

You could go NTFS but I've killed a flash drive in about a month by using it formatted with NTFS. I had caching turned off though. My PC crashes with some hotplug.dll error if I enable it, and I have not been bothered to figure out why. I like it when I can pull out faster anyway.

 

[Gillbot]

is it a brand name device? there are many known fakes floating around.

 

[stultus]

It's a $100 LaCie drive directly from them so it's definitely not a fake. I'll try NTFS without journaling. Thanks for the help!

 

[fairbro]

I would back up whatever you have, if it's valuable. 2 out of 3 of my flash drives just abruptly stopped. The physical back-up is 5000 miles away, in a garage. No fix, I don't think.

 

[Absolution75]

You could always format it with exFAT - its made for external drives and flash drives.

Also, you can convert it to ntfs without formating it with a command line program.

google convert fat32 to ntfs command line