size of drive

[shoselitz]

I bought two of the 1mg flash voyager 2.0 flash memory drives - and both of them only have 991 mb of space on them - rather than 1gb.

 

Why is this?

[RAM GUY]

This is just the way Windows se's and creates the file system. This is normal.

[SpDFrek]

Unformatted the flash memory used in equal to the advertised space. Depending on your formatting and file system you choose to use you will end up with a certain amount of space in the end. Different file systems will cause more "slack". Slack being the amount of space that is wasted due to lustering of the blocks. Let's take an example to illustrate the situation. Let's consider a hard disk volume that is using 32 kiB clusters. There are 17,000 files in the partition.If we assume that each file has half a cluster of slack, then this means that we are wasting 16 kiB of space per file. Multiply that by 17,000 files, and we get a total of 265 MB of slack space. If we assume that most of the files are smaller, and so therefore on average each file has slack space of around two-thirds of a cluster instead of one-half, this jumps to 354 MB! If we were able to use a smaller cluster size for this disk, the amount of space wasted would reduce dramatically. The more files on the disk, the worse the slack gets. To consider the percentage of disk space wasted in this example, divide the slack figure by the size of the disk. So if this were a (full) 1.2 GB disk using 32 kiB clusters, a full 30% of that space is slack. If

the disk is 2.1 GB in size, the slack percentage is 17%. The larger the drive the more space that will be used during formatting.