Flash Drives - General Question

[JMH022]

This site has always helped me with my Excel questions. I was hoping there was someone here that knows something about Flash Drives.

I got a Memorex 512 MB Travel Drive (USB 2.0 Flash Drive) as a gift. I was looking at the properties of the drive and it shows that the total capacity of the drive is 480 MB...not 512 MB.

Is there something wrong with my drive or is there an explanation for the missing 32 MB?

 

[Tazguy37]

Hmmm. Now I'll have to check this out when I get home; I've got a SanDisk Cruzer Mini. At first I was thinking the "missing" space might be for the encryption software. Now, I'm not so sure.

Anybody else have ideas?

 

[Andrew Fergus]

Accuracy gets lost in the marketing of products and the way numbers are interpreted (by humans and Windows) :

1KB = 1024 bytes = 2 ^ 10 bytes
1MB = 1024KB = 2^ 20 bytes

So, in theory 512MB = 536,870,912 bytes but why do you get 480MB?

If you were given a drive with 512,000,000 bytes of space, then dividing by 1,048,576 (i.e. a MB) yields 488MB - not far off the value you saw. Interesting, 512,000,000 bytes = 500,000 KB - a drive made with 500,000 KB perhaps?

I don't think the 512MB is to be taken literally and a quick search through Google shows you are not the only one with this problem.

Useful link here

Andrew.