High Capicity Thumb Drive

[Pe7e]

I bought a great little thumb drive off eBay last week, despite the postal strike it was delivered by airmail from Singapore this morning, and even better no VAT to pay. It's a really nice quality item and has a massive 64GB!! capacity, only cost £20 inc delivery. In my book that's for nothing LINK (http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/64GB-Leather-Flash-Memory-Pen-Stick-Thumb-Drive-USB-2-0_W0QQitemZ180425902756QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCC_Driv es_Storage_Internal?hash=item2a0238caa4) if you want one

[Booche]

Ill be ordering one of them now Cheers Mate :)

[DJ Jules]

I bought a great little thumb drive off eBay last week, despite the postal strike it was delivered by airmail from Singapore this morning, and even better no VAT to pay. It's a really nice quality item and has a massive 64GB!! capacity, only cost £20 inc delivery. In my book that's for nothing LINK (http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/64GB-Leather-Flash-Memory-Pen-Stick-Thumb-Drive-USB-2-0_W0QQitemZ180425902756QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCC_Driv es_Storage_Internal?hash=item2a0238caa4) if you want one

Before you go jumping ahead - Load it with 64Gb of data and verify that you can read it.

There's a whole load of supposedly large capacity thumb drives on eBay which are actually a lot less. I bought a 16Gb drive a while back which turned out to be 1Gb which had been low level formatted to appear as a 16Gb drive. Of course when you load it with over 1Gb of data it starts to just over-write other data.

I'll post a link later to a tool which allows you to verify the actual Chip used in the drive and the real capacity, and re-format it at low level (if it isn't as it should be).

Rule of thumb guys - if it sounds too good to be true - it probably is.

Julian

[Adam_F]

Before you go jumping ahead - Load it with 64Gb of data and verify that you can read it.

There's a whole load of supposedly large capacity thumb drives on eBay which are actually a lot less. I bought a 16Gb drive a while back which turned out to be 1Gb which had been low level formatted to appear as a 16Gb drive. Of course when you load it with over 1Gb of data it starts to just over-write other data.

I'll post a link later to a tool which allows you to verify the actual Chip used in the drive and the real capacity, and re-format it at low level (if it isn't as it should be).

Rule of thumb guys - if it sounds too good to be true - it probably is.

Julian

Yeah, I've seen this on loads of USB sticks about 16GB +

[Charlie Brown]

I have heard that cheap sticks like that can often loose all of your data? :sofa:

[Jiggles]

I have heard that cheap sticks like that can often loose all of your data? :sofa:

I beg to differ. I had a £30 4GB Flash drive that lost all my school work with in a month. I'm now on a £2 4GB drive that's lasted longer. :D

[Vectis]

I had a £30 4GB Flash drive that lost all my school work with in a month

Mrs VV is an English teacher, so I just ran this one by her and apparently she's had the same excuse, erm, observation at least a dozen times this year ;) :D

[spin mobile disco]

I use thumb drives for my backup of accounts contracts etc and have had no problems with my 16gb sony and my 32gb Sandisk cruzer. However I did have a problem with my Philips memory stick it just stopped workign and was only about 6 months old.
I find that SD cards work out very reliable in general and use an sd card for backup of my accounts etc. And they are very easy to carry in a wallet or similar.
Let me know how that card works out for you as that size would be ideal as a backup for my d2 if one of my drives went down.

[DJ Jules]

I use thumb drives for my backup of accounts contracts etc and have had no problems with my 16gb sony and my 32gb Sandisk cruzer. However I did have a problem with my Philips memory stick it just stopped workign and was only about 6 months old.

Yeah, but this may be different. There are a HUGE number of low capacity (1Gb, 2Gb, etc) thumb drives being sold on eBay (and on Amazon!) as much higher capacity drives and it's really, really easy to make a small drive appear much larger (you can download the software and do it within a few minutes).

Julian

[Jiggles]

Mrs VV is an English teacher, so I just ran this one by her and apparently she's had the same excuse, erm, observation at least a dozen times this year ;) :D

Har Har Har. Lucky I back things like that up! :D

[rob1963]

The lesson in this thread seems to be that many thumb drives have much less capacity than stated.

Does this mean my 2GB Pioneer thumb drive from BPM might not really be 2GB?

:eek:

[Pe7e]

I attempted to load a large file onto this drive and it locked up after about 3 GB had loaded, I'll try again tomorrow.

[DJ Jules]

I attempted to load a large file onto this drive and it locked up after about 3 GB had loaded, I'll try again tomorrow.

That might just be because the file is big and your PC has issues moving large data files around (bear in mind that FAT32 formatted drives don't deal well with single files larger than 2Gb anyway). A better way to test would be to load 30Gb of MP3's or something similar, then, after you've loaded them, right click on the drive in windows and select properties, then go to the tools tab, and then click on the "Check Disk" button. If the drive is smaller than it says it is you'll get lots of "Cross linked file" type errors.

I'll try and track down the software to use to verify the drive size.

VV: There have been cases where even brand name drives (SanDisk for instance) have been found to be smaller than the advertised size due to wholesalers buying in batches of imitation products through unauthorised channels so unfortunately - but I wouldn't expect Pioneer to have commissioned someone to brand up USB sticks if they didn't trust them.

This guy explains the whole problem better than me Link (http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/60173/).


The tool to check the drive sizes is available here (http://firesnaker.net/pchardware-fakeusbalcor.php). Instructions for use are in this load of posts (http://www.everythingusb.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=12686).

Hope this helps,

Julian

[Vectis]

Mrs VV is an English teacher, so I just ran this one by her and apparently she's had the same excuse, erm, observation at least a dozen times this year ;) :D



VV: There have been cases where even brand name drives (SanDisk for instance) have been found to be smaller than the advertised size due to wholesalers buying in batches of imitation products through unauthorised channels so unfortunately - but I wouldn't expect Pioneer to have commissioned someone to brand up USB sticks if they didn't trust them.


I know of the technical issues around memory sticks....

Mine was a flippant "Dog ate my homework" remark which obviously went over a few heads... :o :D

[Creature]

i was caught out with the 16 gig thumb drives (mem sticks) as well a few years back. now have a 32 gig that i brought from Argos at £99.00 - it loads just over 31 gig so im happy - at the moment only using as test at home, but it is now in my harddrive box as a backup in case me harddrive goes down

[Twinspin]

i just use a 4gb kingston Pen drive, I wouldnt pay over a tenner for one. But its still cheap for £20.00 4gb suits me fine because i dont put large amounts of music on it. Its just for transferring downloads from 7 digital to play on the hd2500. So i dont have to update the database on my main hardisk all the time. I update my hd2500 database once a month.

I prefer the 2.5" Hardisks i have both a 500gb and 250gb Western Digital Passport for a backup music hardisk, other for personal things

£50.00 will get you a 250gb wd passport which is small enough to fit in your pocket.