I just recently purchased a PNY 256MB USB drive. I have been using it for about 1 week now, and I have conslidated about 31 Floppy disks into my USB Drive. At the moment I have about 16 megs used up and 221 megs of space available. When I get to a certain amount of files in the root directory of the USB drive I cannot continue to put files in the drive because Windows tells me that the drive or media is to full. When I move the files to another directory and clear the root directory I can continue to save more documents on the device. Has anybody else seen this? This seems a little strange to me, but clearing the root directory was my only work around. The PNY website, forget about it, they were not much help. If anybody has any ideas that would be great. Thanks.

pbelliard

The root of any smaller disk is always limited. Can't tell you the figure, (probably 512 or 1024) but you are best off using a separate directory for each floppy you put on there, or go a step further and make dirs within dirs.

RBS your first guess was correct...
The root dir is limited to 512 files.
pbelliard is there a reason you have the drive setup this way; are you using it to boot from ? ?
If not transfer your files to a secure spot and fdisk and format it to one 256 drive.

patio.

I have not setup the device like this. This is the way that I purchased it. I just started using it upon purchase. I will backup all my data and then format it and see what happens. But all this information was good to know. Now is the 512 files uniform for all size drives?

It is proportional to the overall disk size.

My advise: do NOT format your USB-key. (And if you HAVE to, use only the utility supplied by the manufacturer. If no other option, format in FAT16 or FAT32, never NTFS.)

Just make the required sub-directories and MOVE your files from the root of that key into the directories.

Thanks for the advice realblackstuff. I was just thinking yesterday after I read the posts that I had much less than 512 files in the root directory. So I guess that this particular USB key has a smaller limitation in the root directory. I will just save all documents in the different directorys. Thanks again.

I have thumb-drives from 3 different manufacturers and have never had problems from formatting them.

patio.

Attache 64 mb- formatted to 55mb

I have also tried to format an older Attache drive. It is a 64mb size, but when following the instructions on http://sdkbase.smartdisk.com/al/12/2/1011.html (formatting with MAC osX) I only get 55mb of usable space. Anybody see this problem?

jp8, every single hard drive always loses some space for differences on maths what operating systems use, and so on.