Missing Space On USB Flash Drive!

This is normal. Read this Apple document on how hard drive capacity is measured. The same math applies to flash drives.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30065

 Cheers, Tom

Hi.

I think that what might be taking up so much space on your flash drive is a hidden folder named .Trashes, which is created when you delete files in a mounted volume (and those files are not actually deleted, but moved to the .Trashes folder in the same flash drive).

You can reveal hidden files by opening Terminal and typing at the prompt:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE [hit Return]
Killall Finder [hit Return]

Then you can delete the .Trashes folder from the flash drive (be careful and don't remove any other .Trash or .Trashes folder on your system!).

Then hide the hidden files again, typing at the Terminal prompt:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE [hit Return]
Killall Finder [hit Return]

Good Luck.



MacMini G4 1.25GHz 1GB Mac OS X (10.4.10)

You can use a program called WhatSize to see where the space is being used, and it will show you hidden files and folders as well.

The same thing happens on Windows. Windows has hidden files that you can't see when the drive is mounted on a Windows PC, but which are visible when you mount the device on a Mac. I have a program called disktective on my Windows PC to show me where my space is being used that works just like WhatSize. There are other ways to show hidden files on a Windows PC, just as there are other ways to show hidden files on a Mac, but disktective and WhatSize both have nice interfaces where they show you where you're using up the most space on a volume and where the hidden files and folders are.

You could find and delete these hidden files without WhatSize, but using WhatSize is easier and I think has a better interface for this particular task than doing the same thing in the Finder or Terminal.

I don't see it as a big deal, since WhatSize is both free and a very small application. It's one of those little extras that I tell everyone to download as soon as they get their Macs. There's always a few of those for any system; little free or semi-free applications that provide features that are not provided by the default setup.

Possibly, assuming it actually is the hidden files that is consuming your space. If you use a volume on both a Mac and a PC, you'll have hidden files from both OSs, instead of just one. Even if you used it with just one OS, you'd still have hidden files from that OS consuming some space, but it might be less. Have you used WhatSize to see what's really consuming the space?

Plug the drive in and empty the trash because if you deleate something it dosn't actually deleate it till you empty the trash !!!