I have recently bought three Micro USB Flash drives.
All were sold as 128Gb capacity. All show the same Vendor/maker name in control panel under details.
I formatted all in the same slot in the same machine as NTFS
Two - the none Sandisk ones- show as 124Gb which is correct.
The Sandisk one shows as 117Gb capacity so there is something on that drive which which is not accessible to Windows (nor I suspect Linux, but I will check)
This appears to be a pretty standard problem with Sandisk drives when I do a Google search.
I am an IT specialist with over 40 years experience .
How much space did they show before you formatted them? And a. formatting them is not necessary if they are new and b. NTFS is a disk file system. Solid state devices are better served with exFAT which is what they are formatted as at the factory.
Formatting floppies 40 yrs ago was popular but no longer necessary.
I didn’t even look at what they showed since I ALWAYS format every new drive whether pre-formatted or not.
I have been around long enough to know that drives do not necessarily come with the advertised format/capacity and that they can come with “extra presents”.
Not all machines will boot to an exFAT formatted drive and since I tend to use USB sticks for recovering customers’ broken systems as well as carrying data around, NTFS is a better choice.
Either the Sandisk one is faulty or there is some hidden software on there that escapes a format.
In any case I will not use it as it IS suspicious and just not worth the risk of it containing malware
FYI I started my IT career in 1971 so I know where you’re coming from.
Stop formatting USB drives, they are not floppies. New ones 32 MB and smaller are formatted as FAT32 which is accessible by all machines. USB drives larger than 32 MB are formatted as exFAT which is supported by all machines built in the past 20 yrs. NTFS is designed as a hard drive format and includes journaling which adds wear and performance overhead to USB drives. So unless your customers are still using DOS or Windows for Workgroups or Windows XP(?) you should be fine with exFAT.
There use to be an exFAT driver you could add to DOS systems so you could carry that with you, on a FAT32 drive, to add to old hardware you encounter.
If you feel the SanDisk drive is faulty return it, either to where you bought it or to SanDisk for a free replacement.
Thereby hangs half the problem.
Many of my customers ARE using old machines or mission critical machines which use builtin XP or need the error correction of NTFS.
I know there is an exFAT driver for older OSs and already have it in my toolkit., but many of my clients are secure sites and will not allow such changes.
I have already been refunded for the drive.
I have already told you WHY I always format all new drives and that is NOT going to change.
