Why are these USB drives a different capacity?


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I've noticed this in a few sandisks, does one of those flash drives have some sort of management software or hardware pre installed? (Mine do, compared to other flash drives of similar capacity)

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The drive did have managment software, but it was only about 10 megs or so, and I deleted it.

 

Anyway, here is the Disk Managment screenshot (I had to update the files on the drives, so they will have about 200 megs each more space used than in the first screenshot, they are still clones of each other):

 

h5Q3kwo.png

 

And the results of chkdsk:

SHiDKCD.png

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Windows system restore and the hibernation file are usually the two biggest culprits.  also the file allocation table writes to the drive and uses space if your drive is seen to have an error it will over write the bad sector and rewrite it somewhere else on the drive hence using more space , anyway like i said the file allocation table uses a hidden recycle bin to dump junk in and can only be seen in specific programs the easiest way to look at a drive with hidden stuff is through the Nero copying software http://www.nero.com/enu/products/nero/free-trial-download.php you can also try http://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/ 

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Manufacturing tolerances perhaps, I doubt each chip is exactly the same and they're probably allowed a small variation. 

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Disk management won't always show you all partitions.

 

Either reboot into gParted (live linux disc), or Ubuntu/Mint with gParted.

 

Or install this.

 

http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

 

Ignore the bad looking website, it's a great freeware product.  I use it for managing partitions on my Pi installs.

 

 

Post a screenshot of how they appear in there.

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There is also the windows command line tool diskpart.

Run "diskpart" and then execute "list disk". Do a "select disk #" where # is the usb disk number.

Finally do a "list partition" to see if there are any hidden partitions.

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