Flash Drive Defrag

Lurch · Post by **Lurch** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 11:21 am

Hi,

I have a Sandisk 16 GB flash driive that was almost full but I didn't have anywhere near 16 GB of stuff on it. I removed most of the photo folders to a spare HD on my PC but it now shows I have about 8 GB used but I have only about 3 GB of stuff on it. What, if anything can I do about that? Thank you.

RaisinCain · Post by **RaisinCain** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 5:51 pm

Get all you can from the drive and then reformat it. Sounds like it has gotten corrupted somehow.

Lurch · Post by **Lurch** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 7:42 pm

That worked out great. Thank you.

Even after I removed all the photo folders from it and left only the things it came with (which I didn't need or use), it still showed I had 5 GB used but not now. It now shows that I only have 8 kb used. I'll remember that trick. I guess they say defragging them can damage them.

RaisinCain · Post by **RaisinCain** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 7:57 pm

FYI you don't need to ever defragment a flash drive. Glad everything worked out for you.

Lurch · Post by **Lurch** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 8:54 pm

That's good to know. I appreciate it.

I wanted to send a guy over 7 GB of photos so I sent him the photos on an 8 GB flash drive. They're nice for that kind of thing. I don't have a DVD burner.

If a unit says DVD/CD RW in my list of drives, does that mean it's a DVD burner or just a DVD player and CD burner?

RaisinCain · Post by **RaisinCain** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 8:58 pm

That means you have a CD/DVD burner.

Easto · Post by **Easto** » Tue Jun 04, 2013 10:15 pm

Flash drives do come in handy. My largest is a 32gb but I've considered upping that to 64gb. I like to take a lot of hi res pictures when I go and visit friends and sometimes the 32gb gets close to full. And with the way prices are so low you really have no reason not to have at least one around.

Lurch · Post by **Lurch** » Wed Jun 05, 2013 12:50 pm

RaisinCain wrote:That means you have a CD/DVD burner.

It will burn both CDs and DVDs? I didn't think so. I thought it was play DVDs and RW CDs. I think I tried to burn a DVD once but it didn't seem to work.

Faust · Post by **Faust** » Thu Jun 06, 2013 9:46 pm

Recordable DVD media comes in one of 2 basic flavors... DVD+ and DVD-. Nowadays the vast majority of DVD burners support both types, but awhile back there was a battle between companies trying to establish market dominance (too lazy to google it for specific names right now) of their DVD+ or DVD- format. So it is possible you may have a DVD burner which doesn't support both types, particularly if it's an older device. Beyond that, I don't think I have ever seen a DVD burner of any kind that wasn't backward compatible with (reading/writing) CDs.

This is all intentional and logical when it comes to the companies wanting to keep their devices desirable to the consumer. If you shop Blu-ray burners (for example), you'll see they pretty much cover legacy (CD and DVD) formats. Mainly due to the fact most folks wouldn't want to have to buy separate optical drives for every format.