Cruzer Glide 128GB now only 119GB

After formatting the 128 USB thumb drive on a Mac, then reformatting it again on a Windows 7 laptop, the drive will not provide more that 119 GB of available free space. Is there a way to get the free space back to factory default of 127.x GB (approx)? I have followed the tech notes in the forum (exFAT, Quick Format, Default block size).

I just bought one of these usb drives and you are right- only 119GB of storage available on the drive.

What’s going on here? 10GB of…what?

@dawter wrote:

 

What’s going on here? 10GB of…what?

Marketing and memory measurement realities.

http://petapixel.com/2012/10/10/why-hard-drives-and-memory-cards-have-less-space-than-advertised/

I disagree however with the second to last paragraph though. Memory cards, flash drives and mp3 players (essentially anything that has a memory storage space, whether it be a hard drive or flash memory) are equally subject to this too. 119GB of useable (or real) space sounds right for a 128GB drive.

Here’s another example . . . I just got a new computer at work this week. It has an ‘advertised’ 1 TB (Terabyte) hard drive. The actual memory space? 905GB. Granted it has Windows 8 installed on it, but really nothing much else. There’s no way almost 100GB is being eaten up by the installed software. It just the reality of actual space vs. advertised.

On your new work machine, which I suspect is Windows 8, part of the 1 TB is allocated to the hidden UEFI partition.  There is also probably a hidden system recovery partition. In addition to the overhead of formating, slack bytes, cylinder head alignment, partition table, etc…

Flash drives are made as super floppies; no MBR, no partition table, no cylinder alignments, etc., all of which get destroyed when a user formats them, thus their numbers are closer together.