USB FLash drive issues

jsmoke · 5 Mar 2017 at 12:41

Bought a cheap 256GB pen drive from ebay. I have read the arguments that these cheap and high capacity drives are not really their stated capacity rather some trick is used to display this. However it I have filled it with over 100GB, not had any need to try and fill to 256GB.

However it is giving me issues, for example I just made an image of my HD and saved the image to the drive, now it gives me invalid image file when I try and load the file from a boot-up CD.

The same image file stored on the system HD checks out ok when checked with the imaging software locally.

I am formatting the USB drive with the HP utility tool to see if that makes a difference but there is an obvious problem with the drive, any idea why this shouldbe, I mean cheap or not, a flash drive should be a flash drive?

demonix · 5 Mar 2017 at 17:01

It might have been showing all the files, but in all likelihood a majority of those files would be completely or partly corrupt which is why you're getting the invalid image file when trying to access it.

Formatting the drive is unlikely to do anything since the shown capacity is going to be false and that is never going to change.

Gamers Nexus did a video recently on a fake 2TB flash drive which turned out to be around 11GB.

jsmoke · 5 Mar 2017 at 21:16

Did a full format and now is kaput, must be a fake drive. Lesson learned.

ED209 · 5 Mar 2017 at 21:41

If you got it off the bay open a case or something through paypal?

jsmoke · 6 Mar 2017 at 15:24

Working again, formatted to NTFS this time now image is fine on drive, I will need to try and fill the drive up with file to see if it is actually 256GB.

Big.Wayne · 7 Mar 2017 at 18:50

Hi jsmoke,

I had similar issues with some cheap 16GB pen drives I bought for O/S installs, I only needed 8GB drives but 16GB were almost the same price. Anyway they worked fine until one day when I decided to reformat them NTFS and that's when the issues began, failed installs, drive not recognised etc.

I recently tinkered with the drives in a last effort to save them from the bin so I formatted them back to fat32 and they now work fine again? . . . after a little snooping around on google it seemed the issue may have something to do with the "eject USB device" thingy not working as it should, that little icon in the bottom right of system tray that you can right click on and tell Windows to "eject" the USB drive may be buggy, at least in Windows 7 so even though the OS tells you it's safe to remove the drive they may be some files still moving across so when you unplug it you inadvertently corrupt the file system resulting in a borked drive.

I wait now at least 15 seconds after windows tells me it's safe to remove the drive before I actually unplug it or if the data is super important and I have to travel with it on USB I will actually shut down the PC before unplugging. Perhaps extreme measures but so far so good.

Maybe you just have junk drives but be mindful of how you unplug them, just to be sure!