# Not enough space on flash drive



## fullinfusion (Mar 20, 2012)

I have an ADATA 16GB usb 3.0 thumb drive that when formatted it's showing 14.6GB in size.

I cant copy a movie to it, says not enough space, what gives?


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## Dos101 (Mar 20, 2012)

Is it formatted to FAT32? If so format it to NTFS and copy it. FAT32 has a limit of 4GB file sizes.


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## ShRoOmAlIsTiC (Mar 20, 2012)

that actually is 16gb.  just like hard drives when you buy a 500 gb you are only really getting like 478gb or something like that.


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## Sir B. Fannybottom (Mar 20, 2012)

Dos101 said:


> Is it formatted to FAT32? If so format it to NTFS and copy it. FAT32 has a limit of 4GB file sizes.



^ What he said. Right click on it then click on format


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## fullinfusion (Mar 20, 2012)

Dos101 said:


> Is it formatted to FAT32? If so format it to NTFS and copy it. FAT32 has a limit of 4GB file sizes.


Yup FAT32, NTFS is working just fine and thank you!

Whats the deal with fat32 and ntfs? anything I should know?


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## fullinfusion (Mar 20, 2012)

working good now


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## Sir B. Fannybottom (Mar 20, 2012)

fullinfusion said:


> working good now
> 
> http://img.techpowerup.org/120320/3.png



To my knowledge Fat32 copies smaller files faster, but NTFS can copy big files... Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong


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## Aquinus (Mar 20, 2012)

It's just how the files are stored. FAT32 is an older standard with NTFS(5) being a newer one.

"No one will ever need more than 64k of memory!"
Clearly this is why we're not using 16-bit anymore.


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## fullinfusion (Mar 20, 2012)

Nice!


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## Dos101 (Mar 21, 2012)

fullinfusion said:


> Yup FAT32, NTFS is working just fine and thank you!
> 
> Whats the deal with fat32 and ntfs? anything I should know?



No problem man.

Just like Kevinheraiz and Aquinus said, it's an older standard and and transfers data faster at lower capacities. Afaik it's also compatible with more OS's than NTFS.


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## brandonwh64 (Mar 21, 2012)

Here explains it quite well



> FAT32
> The original File Allocation Table (FAT) file system was introduced in 1977 and generally applied to floppy disk storage. It was later modified to work with hard disks and other removable media. FAT had a problem however; it could only manage spaces up to 2GB in size. As Windows came into being and programs became larger, the 2GB barrier became a serious problem. Thus, in 1996, with the OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2) of Windows 95 (also known as Windows 95b) came a FAT enhancement known as FAT32.
> The two major features of FAT32 that improved upon the original FAT (or FAT16 as it's sometimes known) are the disk efficiency and size of the disk supported.
> Files are stored in clusters on the disk. The size of the clusters depends on the size of disk. Under FAT, drives over 1.2GB used clusters that were 32K in size as the file allocation table itself could not track more clusters because of it's 16-bit structure. The 32-bit structure in FAT32 allows disks of that size to use 4K per sector. This improves efficiency as a file, no matter how small, will always use at least one cluster and the space in the cluster not used is wasted. FAT32 doesn't start to use 32K clusters until the disk goes over 60GB in size and can handle disks up to 2TB (terabyte or trillion bytes); though not all operating systems can deal with disks that size even if the file system can.
> ...



Source


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## micropage7 (Mar 21, 2012)

fullinfusion said:


> Yup FAT32, NTFS is working just fine and thank you!
> 
> Whats the deal with fat32 and ntfs? anything I should know?



http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm


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## Bambooz (Mar 21, 2012)

On USB sticks:

If you need to store big (over 4GB) files -> NTFS
If you need guaranteed compatibility with older machines and other OS's -> FAT32

FAT32 is far more compatible, but has several limitations, one being the max. filesize of 4GB.
NTFS supports large files and lots of other features like compression, but may not be easily usable on all machines (older ones or ones using other/obscure operating systems with no or just partial NTFS support)

exFAT was supposed to be a compromise between the two, but it's pretty much a total flop due to even worse compatibility (Vista only since SP1, XP only with an extra patch, ...)


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