Solved USB 3 Flash Drive... Could It Be Faulty ?

[Mooly]

I recently acquired a Sandisk 32gb 'Ultra Fit' flash drive which is one of the small nano styled devices and I'm not really happy with its performance. Its the first USB3 flash drive I've used although I do use a normal USB 3 portable HDD for archiving files.

What I find is this,

1/ It runs pretty hot even when in a fresh formatted state and idle.

2/ It seems to cause the PC to work harder in the above state with the fan running a lot of the time. Unplug the drive and it stops.

3/ File transfer speed is good at around 30+mbs.

4/ I tried to copy a single 13.5gb Acronis backup file to the flash drive and Windows reports that there is insufficient space !!! This is with the drive formatted and showing 32gb free.

The drive was bought from a very well known high street retailer and I've no real doubts on it being fake or anything like that. It was all packaged absolutely as you would expect.

What do you think ? Would you expect an idle drive to run hot and is there any reason the 13.5gb file would not transfer.

 

[topgundcp]

What is the format ? ExFat ? NTFS ? FAT32 ? It sounds like the disk is formatted with FAT32 then it won't take a large file > 4 GB

 

[Mooly]

Good question. Yes, its formatted using its defaults which I think are FAT32. Thanks , I should have twigged that one.

Would you expect it to run hot when idle though ? or is that normal for a USB 3 flash drive.

 

[topgundcp]

For flash drive. You can either format with NTFS or ExFat. However, NTFS on flash memory has been known to be inefficient for quite some time. exFAT’s smaller footprint/overhead.

 

[Mooly]

Thanks topgun, I've formatted it to exFat and that works OK file wise. Thanks :thumb:

 

[topgundcp]

Thanks topgun, I've formatted it to exFat and that works OK file wise. Thanks :thumb:

You're welcome.