I've seen a few reports recently about USB drives that are not what they seem. For example, a 1 TB USB drive may actually have a capacity of only 32 MB, but the drive appears to be 1 TB to the operating system. It'll appear to load your files, but when you go to retrieve them, they aren't there.
Or, as Tech Radar reports, the drive may be using a chip of dubious quality; for example, a chip rejected by a manufacturer because it failed quality control. Steve Gibson has created the ValiDrive utility that will scan the drive and report its actual capacity. It's small, requires no installationm, and free.
To use it, open the program and insert the drive you want to scan into your PC. It will start scanning the drive, scanning 576 sectors across the memory from beginning to end, logging read and write errors, and report the total actual (as opposed to reported) size.
It's a useful utility and I will run it on any drives or cards that get.
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