Formatting doesn’t use all the bytes. Gaps between clusters. Normal.
A more simple answer would be to say that nothing is ever the exact amount.
Whether a USB (NOT Pendrive) drive or phone or whatever.
I think to say it is just a formatting thing is incorrect because that implies there is a way to have access to all 64gb 100%, which is just not possible.
“In the simplest terms, to prolong the life of the drive and formatting. You’ll notice this with any drive even hard drives that the total storage is a little less than the advertised storage capacity. This is fine. Some of that storage is lost to formatting and many manufacturers will reserve a certain amount of space on a disk, especially flash based ones, to move around data to balance out the use of the memory cells or act as a cache to increase drive speed. If you used the full capacity of the drive it wouldn’t last nearly as long. Completely filling up and solid state drive will reduce its life span.”
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USB flash drives show a lower capacity for two reasons.
- The capacity of a flash drive is advertised as decimal numbers where kilo is 1000, mega is 1 000 000 and so on. while windows is calculating in binary where kilo is 1024, mega 1024² and giga 1024³ so your flash drive is actually about 61.52 decimal gigabytes. if you divide it by 1024 3times the binary size is about 57.3 gigabytes as shown in a screenshot.
- Some of that 64gb is reserved to the flash drive firmware to be used for wear levelling (a technique used to increase a lifespan of a flash media by spreading the writes to different cells of a memory chip)
Both of them are expected and likely noted on the package of the flash drive. There exist no flash drive that show 64 binary gigabytes (except of maybe fake flash drives that are programmed to show larger capacity than they really are)
