Q: 32 gig thumb drive = 26 gig?
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Aug 5, 2012 8:35 AMby b j t,HelpfulThis article also explains the different way that the drive space is calculated: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2419
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Aug 5, 2012 12:58 PMby Richard Pini,Thanks for the replies. I was curious because some small time ago I'd partitioned a couple of 16gig flash drives the very same way, and ended up with most of the 16 gigs available - nothing at all like the bite taken out of the 32s. (Plus, while poking at this, I discovered that if I partition the 32 gig drive into two 16 gig volumes, EACH of those gets the same 5-6 gig chunk stolen - clearly a losing game.)
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Aug 5, 2012 11:01 PMby b j t,There is a formula for doing the math's that is explained in more detail in this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Capacity.
I hope this gives you a better understanding of how the drive size is calculated.
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by clintonfrombirmingham,Aug 5, 2012 11:10 PM
clintonfrombirmingham
Aug 5, 2012 11:10 PM
in response to Richard Pini
Level 7
(30,009 points)
Mac OS XOK, I have a couple of SanDisk 32GB drives and they format to 32.02 GB. I just plugged one in to see the total capacity using Disk Utility. It may be due to the maker of the drive - who manufactured your USB flash drives?
Clinton
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Aug 6, 2012 12:09 AMby Courcoul,And, as you use it, be sure to empty the trash. Each volume has its own "trash bin" so to say, so if you dismount the thumbdrive and then do an Empty Trash, the junk in the thumbdrive survives since it wasn't around when bits were being blasted. Then, when you plug it back in, SURPRISE, trash magically reappears.
Last but not least, these being, well, drives, GB == Gigabytes are calculated as 10^9 = 1,000,000,000 bytes. Memory is measured in powers of 2 so gb == gibibytes which is 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes.
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Aug 6, 2012 4:14 AMby Richard Pini,These are SanDisk. And I do know about how drive size is measured, the new vs. the old terminology. Related to the "empty trash" suggestion, I went looking about and found a different suggestion for formatting the thumb drive - instead of using Disk Utility to "partition", just use it to "erase" - set the format to Mac OS and, magically somehow, I ended up with (almost) 32 gigs of usable space (in GUID too, so it can be used as a boot drive).
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by clintonfrombirmingham,Aug 6, 2012 4:17 AM
clintonfrombirmingham
Aug 6, 2012 4:17 AM
in response to Richard Pini
Level 7
(30,009 points)
Mac OS X
That's how I use two of mine. I have one with Lion installed (and the "Install OS X Lion.app" in the Applications folder, and one setup the same with Mountain Lion. I can boot from both, use the OS X installer from both, etc. Mine are SanDisk as well. Got a deal on them through Amazon.
Clinton
