Dwight Watt - Newspaper Article #90 1/26/2011


Question: How much space is still on my thumb drive?

Answer:

Finding how much space is available on your thumb/flash drive is like finding that information about the hard drive in your PC.

Put the flash/thumb (also called other names) in your PC.

Now go to the Start menu and choose Computer or My Computer (or if you have a desktop icon for Computer /My Computer choose it). Then you will find your thumb/flash drive on the list. It will be a higher letter (the first hard drive in your PC is C, your CD/DVD drive will normally be D or E) and either the name the manufacturer gave the drive will appear (for instance SANS or HP)or if you have renamed it. It may be a cryptic looking name. You can click on the drive and see the contents and know if correct drive (if you do then back up to where all drives are listed).

Now right click on the drive and choose properties. You will then get a page that states how large the drive is, how much space is available and also show a graph showing those amounts. You normally want to keep at least 10% of any drive unused.

You may get confuse by the total space as it will not be exactly the same number as what your drive says it is. When you buy a drive (hard, floppy, flash/thumb, etc) they round the number of the size. Which means that you get a dive that is 2 gig you may find the size is actually 2,021,326,848 bytes or 1.88 gigabyes. These are actual numbers from my 2 gig thumb/flash drive. They build the drives in numbers from base 2 and that does not match in decimal exactly. Then round in advertising. Also there will be bad spots on a drive that are not used so the numbers will vary.

Check the space available occasionally and buy new drives as needed. Flash/thumb drives have come way down ion price over the years and gotten much larger in storage size and physically have gotten smaller. Thumb/flash drives are a wonderful portable storage. Use them in the PC just like a hard drive

Thanks Boyd for the question