We are frequently asked by some new customers from Alibaba if the USB Flash Drives we sell are really with full capacity, what they expect is that the usb drives should show exactly the same capacity as indicated, but the fact is, for the usb drives, as well as other storage devices such as hard disk and flash card, capacity you see on the computer is always less than the stated one, for example, a 4GB memory stick normally shows only 3.74GB, and why is that? There are basically 2 reasons which I would like to explain with this post:
a) In every usb drive, even after it’s formatted and hasn’t been used, there is still a hidden partition containing the system files in order for the usb drive to work probably.
b) The operation systems and flash manufacturers are using different methods to calculate the capacities, with the operation systems, 1MB=1024KB(and 1GB=1024MB); but for the manufacturers, 1MB=1000KB(and 1GB=1000MB) only.
Now we know why the capacity shown on the computer has to be less than it’s stated.