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meerkt
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Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Thu Jan 01, 2015 10:21 am

I have a Kingston DataTraveler SE9 8GB USB drive here. The capacity is actually 7.8GB (base 10). There are no multiple drive letters, no extra partitions, no strange software running on insertion.

Another type of Kingston 8GB I have is as it should be.

Do UFDs now cheat on capacities?
 
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 3:24 pm

Formatted capacity has always been lower since the 90s, basically the last things that were quoted in formatted capacity were floppy disks. Why do you think it'd suddenly be different?
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 3:53 pm

It varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, and even between different models from the same manufacturer. Really, about the only thing you can count on is that the unformatted capacity will be within a half percent or so of the advertised capacity, at a minimum. Some have enough excess space that they will still yield the advertised capacity when formatted, and some do not. Based on a cursory examination of the random collection of thumbdrives I have at my desk (a mix of PNY, Team, and Wintec in various capacities), it is pretty close to 50/50 odds whether the formatted capacity meets or exceeds the advertised size.

Also keep in mind that different filesystems have varying amounts of overhead, so the effective capacity also depends a bit on whether the drive is formatted FAT, exFAT, NTFS, ext3/4, etc...
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:07 pm

I've always understood part of the missing capacity is because some is reserved for the file system. What you have isn't bad. What I really hate are the flash drives that advertise a certain size, for example 16GB advertised, but the true capacity might be 2 GB. This leads to massive data loss. You can google this and find tips and tricks to find out if you have the true advertised capacity or a hacked one. Just google "check real flash drive capacity" and you'll get a few hits. Actually I'm looking through the list now. I have some new jump drives I want to check before using them.
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meerkt
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:13 pm

7.8GB is 2.5% off. I have another unit of the exact same model and that one is 7.75GB.

On the other hand, a different type of Kingston I have is just slightly above 8GB.

I'm starting to think the SE9 ones I have are fake. The SE9s don't even have the same USB PID, though it is consecutive numbers.
Last edited by meerkt on Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:29 pm, edited 2 times in total.
 
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:16 pm

ThatStupidCat wrote:
What I really hate are the flash drives that advertise a certain size, for example 16GB advertised, but the true capacity might be 2 GB. This leads to massive data loss. You can google this and find tips and tricks to find out if you have the true advertised capacity or a hacked one. Just google "check real flash drive capacity" and you'll get a few hits. Actually I'm looking through the list now. I have some new jump drives I want to check before using them.

I haven't encountered one of those "fake capacity" thumbdrives in a very long time, and never from an established brand. I tend to stick with PNY, Kingston, Team, Wintec, Verbatim, etc... in other words, the brands that have been for sale at places like Newegg, TigerDirect, and Microcenter for years. Just stick with established brands, and don't buy them at flea markets or from dodgy online sellers (who might have no qualms with selling you counterfeit goods), and you won't have this issue.
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:18 pm

I have a handful of PNY drives. Their capacities are all slightly lower. They're all right around 15.6GB, which matches 2x your 7.8GB. They were advertised as 16GB. But I've never seen one with capacities like ThatStupidCat was talking about. I figure if it's within 5% of the advertised capacity it's probably OK. Anything that varies more than that would get returned by me.
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meerkt
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:21 pm

Checked a noname 2GB UFD. It's just a bit above 2GB.
 
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:22 pm

meerkt wrote:
7.8GB is 2.5% off. I have another unit of the exact same model and that one is 7.75GB.

Are they both formatted with the same type of file system? Is either one of them partitioned?
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:28 pm

They're both NTFS, but anyway I'm looking at whole disk sizes using DISKPART.

The difference to the partition size as reported by Windows Explorer is maybe 1MB, BTW.
 
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:46 pm

DISKPART reports sizes in binary GB (units of 2^30); storage vendors typically quote capacities in decimal GB (units of 10^9). A binary GB is approximately 7% larger than a decimal GB, so the reported capacity is lower.

Edit: Some relevant linkage...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
http://blog.codinghorror.com/gigabyte-d ... vs-binary/
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 4:52 pm

All NAND devices - a usb memory stick like your SE9 or even a microSD card - uses a controller.

I would expect that the difference between capacities (if it's not a formatting difference) is different controllers or different firmware allocating more or less spare area for error-correction parity, performance reasons, or something else.
Both a 240GB and and 256GB SSD usually have the exact same quantity of NAND inside them, the difference is how much NAND is user-accessible via the controller.

The only thing that might explain a memory stick that is larger than expected is that Kingston harvested defective NAND and it's using a 16GiB NAND die that's full of bad sectors and running heavy on ECC.
If you performance-test two different capacity "8GB" SE9 sticks, I wouldn't be surprised to see quite different results between two supposedly identical models.

Take this example. Even between genuine Kingston microSD cards of the same capacity, there are controller differences.
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 5:04 pm

Chrispy_ wrote:
The only thing that might explain a memory stick that is larger than expected is that Kingston harvested defective NAND and it's using a 16GiB NAND die that's full of bad sectors and running heavy on ECC.

I'd be really surprised if they're doing this. Do you have any references that indicate this is common practice in the industry? And has anyone actually seen a drive that is larger than the specified capacity, IN BINARY GB (since the flash chips themselves are sized in binary units)?

Chrispy_ wrote:
If you performance-test two different capacity "8GB" SE9 sticks, I wouldn't be surprised to see quite different results between two supposedly identical models.

I think it is far more likely that differences in capacity between different units of the same model are due to different versions of the internal firmware. Or possibly even having the internal controller chip sourced from different suppliers. Thumbdrives are cheap, high volume commodities; I imagine it is not unusual for thumbdrive vendors to switch suppliers based on cost and/or supply issues.
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meerkt
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 6:28 pm

just brew it! wrote:
DISKPART reports sizes in binary GB (units of 2^30); storage vendors typically quote capacities in decimal GB (units of 10^9).
I did mention in the first post I'm talking about base 10 sizes. :) I expect to see 8,000,000,000 bytes available.

Chrispy_ wrote:
I would expect that the difference between capacities (if it's not a formatting difference) is different controllers or different firmware allocating more or less spare area for error-correction parity, performance reasons, or something else.

I assume that's why you don't have ~8.5GB^10 bytes available but 8.0.

Chrispy_ wrote:
Bunnie's SD study was indeed amusing. :)

Anyway, I've sent a question to Kingston.
 
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 6:49 pm

meerkt wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
DISKPART reports sizes in binary GB (units of 2^30); storage vendors typically quote capacities in decimal GB (units of 10^9).

I did mention in the first post I'm talking about base 10 sizes. :)

True. But then in a later post you mentioned "whole disk sizes using DISKPART". So I got confused about whether you were looking at some sizes in decimal or binary, since DISKPART reports everything in binary units. If you were manually converting the sizes reported by DISPART to decimal, then never mind!

Sounds like something funky may be going on then. I am very puzzled regarding why Windows Explorer reports nearly the same size though; the formatted capacities should be in approximately the same ratio as the unformatted capacities. Have you tried doing a fresh re-partition and format of both drives to see if the size reported by Windows Explorer changes?

meerkt wrote:
I expect to see 8,000,000,000 bytes available.

Formatted or unformatted? Are we talking about DISKPART or Windows Explorer here?
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 8:04 pm

All of the above were base-10.

What do you mean when you speak of "ratio"?

There's little difference between raw size and formatted, as partitioning and filesystem overhead is minimal. And actually, I think all non-fixed NTFS overhead is counted in Explorer's total/used capacity, as otherwise your total drive capacity would change as you use the drive.

Just out of curiosity, I checked the NTFS metafiles on one of the USB drives. There are about 2400 files and directories. All the metafiles are about 25MB, most of it for journaling and transactional logs. The MFT is about 2.5MB, the allocation bitmap is 250KB (= 2M clusters).

For 8GB in FAT32, assuming the same 4K cluster size, the two FATs would be just 16MB. Still nowhere near 200-300MB.
 
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 8:30 pm

meerkt wrote:
All of the above were base-10.

Yeah, but when you say you expect 8,000,000,000 bytes do you mean the raw capacity or the formatted capacity? I am still unclear on which one you mean.

meerkt wrote:
What do you mean when you speak of "ratio"?

You indicated that one of the drives has a raw capacity of 7.8GB, and the other is 7.75GB. But you also noted that Windows Explorer reports the capacities as being within 1MB of each other. That doesn't make much sense if the raw capacities differ by 50MB. The ratio between the raw capacities of the two drives, and the ratio of the formatted capacities, should be close to the same. Unless they're formatted with different filesystems or something.

Edit: FWIW, according to an experiment I just tried, a freshly formatted (as NTFS) 8GB drive with no user files in it shows up has having a total capacity of 7.99GB, and has 7.92GB free, according to Windows Explorer.
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 9:58 pm

I expect 8GB raw, though the difference to the formatted capacity is minimal as you see on your 7.99GB formatted drive.

The 1MB difference I mentioned isn't between the drives, but between the DISKPART disk capacity and the total size reported by Explorer. Maybe even this 1MB can be reduced with different partitioning. I just left it the way it came; apparently with a 1MB offset for the partition.

The 8GB drives are slow writers and I'd rather not empty them temporarily, so I didn't check how much space Explorer reports as taken on an empty drive.

But I did check a noname 1GB drive: 1,970,176 raw sectors = 1.008GB. Partition offset is 64KB.

Formatted by Win8.1 as...

NTFS 4K. Explorer total is 1.006GB, of which 15MB are used (no visible files in Explorer, 5MB NTFS metafiles, not sure where the other 10MB are).
FAT32 4K. 1.002GB, 4K used.
FAT16 16K. 1.006GB, 0 used.
exFAT 4K. 1.005GB, 45K used.

So, there's at least 2MB gone. Not sure why it's more than the 1MB on the 8GB drives, and those were partitioned with a 1MB offset unlike the 64KB here. For FAT32 there's an extra 2MB used by 2 FATs and the rest unknown, maybe alignment/misc reserved sectors? I'm totally unfamiliar with exFAT so no comment there. :)
 
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Fri Jan 02, 2015 10:07 pm

It is sounding like these drives are indeed slightly under-sized. As noted previously, all the drives I checked were within a half percent or so of the advertised (raw) capacity.
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Sat Jan 03, 2015 6:04 am

just brew it! wrote:
Chrispy_ wrote:
The only thing that might explain a memory stick that is larger than expected is that Kingston harvested defective NAND and it's using a 16GiB NAND die that's full of bad sectors and running heavy on ECC.

I'd be really surprised if they're doing this. Do you have any references that indicate this is common practice in the industry? And has anyone actually seen a drive that is larger than the specified capacity, IN BINARY GB (since the flash chips themselves are sized in binary units)?


The only reference is one I glossed over yesterday when looking up what controller types were used in USB/SDcard NAND: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554

Flash memory is really cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it’s too good to be true. In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception. The illusion of a contiguous, reliable storage media is crafted through sophisticated error correction and bad block management functions.

and, the reason I suspect larger dies that are salvaged for lower-capacity at retail:
In our experience, the quality of the flash chip(s) integrated into memory cards varies widely. It can be anything from high-grade factory-new silicon to material with over 80% bad sectors. Those concerned about e-waste may (or may not) be pleased to know that it’s also common for vendors to use recycled flash chips salvaged from discarded parts. Larger vendors will tend to offer more consistent quality, but even the largest players staunchly reserve the right to mix and match flash chips with different controllers, yet sell the assembly as the same part number — a nightmare if you’re dealing with implementation-specific bugs.

It's an interesting read!
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Sat Jan 03, 2015 8:29 am

Ugh. Just one more area where it's a big race to the bottom.
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Re: Kingston DT SE9 capacity lower than advertised?

Sat Jan 03, 2015 11:22 am

I'm not that worried. Memory sticks are super-convenient and I can get 4GB Datatraveller SE9's for around £2 when I buy in bulk.

To date, I've never had an SE9 fail on me and I've even put a few of them through the wash! Salvaged or not, they are fit for purpose at a price I can't argue with ;)
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