How much space on a 16 Gb. flash drive after formatting?

techs

Lifer
Sep 26, 2000
28,561
4
0
I need to put the data of 3 full DVD's (4.37Gb. each) on flash drives.
Will 16 Gb. drives be large enough?
 

BlueWeasel

Lifer
Jun 2, 2000
15,940
474
126
Should be. My 16GB Mushkin drive has 14.9GB of space formatted as FAT32.

You'd need to format them as NTFS to get around the 2GB filesize limitation.
 

Hellhammer

AnandTech Emeritus
Apr 25, 2011
701
4
81
16GB is ~14.9GiB (Windows uses GB even though in fact is it GiB), so you should be able to fit three DVDs just fine.
 

BFG10K

Lifer
Aug 14, 2000
22,674
2,824
126
Here’s the interesting thing: it depends on the manufacturer as to how much is usable.

I have three different brands of 16GB flash drives, and all three have different amounts of usable space. The lowest of the three has 14.4GB.
 

blastingcap

Diamond Member
Sep 16, 2010
6,654
5
76
Here’s the interesting thing: it depends on the manufacturer as to how much is usable.

I have three different brands of 16GB flash drives, and all three have different amounts of usable space. The lowest of the three has 14.4GB.

Care to name names?
 

blastingcap

Diamond Member
Sep 16, 2010
6,654
5
76
Hmm, weird, I can understand different levels of OVERprovisioning but to have half a gig go missing in user-accessible space is bizarre.
 

It's Not Lupus

Senior member
Aug 19, 2012
838
3
76
Here’s the interesting thing: it depends on the manufacturer as to how much is usable.

I have three different brands of 16GB flash drives, and all three have different amounts of usable space. The lowest of the three has 14.4GB.
have you tried a quick format on them?
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,229
9,990
126
I've noticed that I ALWAYS seem to "lose" space on a flash drive, when I format it in Windows 7. Doesn't matter if I use the HP format tool, or just Windows' built-in format.

Somehow, the mfg is using a FAT32 formatting tool that formats out to more space.

At first, I thought that my testing with vconsole.com 's USB testing (low-level write/read tool) was causing the flash drive to remap bad sectors, and then a subsequent high-level format was showing the effects of that, but when I did that three times to three different flash drives, and their original and new format sizes were identical (Edit: Between the three flash drives - the after format size was smaller than the original though), I realized that it wasn't just bad sectors. (What are the odds that three flash drives have exactly the same number of bad sectors mapped out during a write pass?)

I figure it has to do with the offset that Win7 uses when formatting things, compared to XP and DOS.