Magical vanishing Flash Storage!
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So I've had a new issue today: I was going about installing some drivers onto a USB for a PC with an in-operative Ethernet controller... And the USB drives I was going to put them on, have all changed from 8GB, to various small sizes, in the order of Hundreds of KB. These have all come from a bag that we received for free, courtesy of Scale Computing, at Spicecorps 2013 in Rochester. I've tried reformatting, using ones that I know have worked in the past, testing on multiple machines, and using fresh ones, and they've all changed to being much smaller, but all different sizes.
Does anyone have experience with this sort of drive degradation on USB Flash Storage?
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Could it be that they have drive images on them?
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I've not known a USB thumb drive to just start giving variable space... They either work or crap out completely. If they are crapping out,.. they generally will have read/write issues. also.
While there could be hidden files and such on them as @scottalanmiller suggested, you may want to change how you are formatting them.
Select one out of the group, format it with Windows is it close to the stated capacity?
Take the same unit, format it with RUFUS and do the same thing... did the size change?
You can also try the HP USB Format tool.
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@g.jacobse Tried all this. Also, they were functioning perfectly yesterday. Ones I've used before are now doing this, ones never touched before are as well., I tried 4 drives.
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Interesting - this is different to say the list. Do you have any that are not from that bag that you can try the same cycle with? Any Kennston, Sony, Samsung or other drives you could try?
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@Mike-Ralston said:
@g.jacobse Tried all this. Also, they were functioning perfectly yesterday. Ones I've used before are now doing this, ones never touched before are as well., I tried 4 drives.
Oh, now THAT is weird.
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@g.jacobse Yeah, no issues with anything but those.
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Format them from the command line and see. Sounds like it's partitioned or running a boot image.
Also could be that scale computing got duped. there are plenty of 8GB, 16GB, 32GB & 64GB for sale online that are less than 1GB of actual storage they just make them report has high number to the OS and most people don't notice til to late. When you try to use more than the actual storage is when problems happen.
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@thecreativeone91 That seems to be the issue... They're not REALLY 8GB
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@Mike-Ralston said:
@thecreativeone91 That seems to be the issue... They're not REALLY 8GB
Sounds like a case of 'chuckware'... Time to chuck them.
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@g.jacobse said:
Sounds like a case of 'chuckware'... Time to chuck them.
Sure does!
