SOLVED How to test USB drive?

[don256us]

I have a friend who wanted a 16GB USB drive to store audio books and music. He went to Amazon and purchased a lot of 5 16GB thumb drives. When they arrived, they appear to be 32GB. This could have been a mistake. E.G. Maybe my friend didn't read it close enough and ordered 32GB. Maybe he forgot what he ordered and thought they were supposed to be 16GB. (Friends my age do that. Forget things.) Maybe the guy at Amazon grabbed from the wrong bin or these were placed in the wrong bin at Amazon. I don't know.

It is unusual for a scammer USB drive to be more than advertised but we want to test it out anyway.

What is the best tool to check it's actual size instead of the reported size?

 

[JLK03F150]

Here's a small program to test his thumb drives.

H2TestW- Download - Official Site [2023]

Download h2testw for free. H2testw is a program that can test your storage devices for their actual size against claimed size.

h2testw.org

 

[don256us]

Thank you. Unfortunately, I can't download the program. One link goes in a circle to the page that the link is on. The other link goes to OneDrive and states that the file does not exist.

I got it from a different site.

Vielen Dank für den Download von H2testw | heise Download

Software & Apps zum Download, sowie Cloud-Dienste für Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android. Wir bieten dir die Software, die du suchst - schnell & sicher!

www.heise.de

 

[JLK03F150]

Glad you found a good link. I posted to their main site after seeing a Der8auer youtube video on fake SSDs & he used that program.

 

[don256us]

Turns out that the USB drive he bought is indeed 32GB with 30.xGB available for use. The speeds however are USB 1.1 which is good enough for him. He's still using Windows 7 and stores audio on the thumb drives to use with his car radio. Speed is NOT an issue for him.

Thank you for the help.

 

[ihrsetrdr]

I'm assuming that you're running Win 10 or 11....doesn't Windows still have the disk management utility? Your friend could check the Amazon purchase invoice to see what was ordered.

 

[don256us]

I'm assuming that you're running Win 10 or 11....doesn't Windows still have the disk management utility? Your friend could check the Amazon purchase invoice to see what was ordered.

I'm not sure that Disk Management will see through a forged FAT. I think "" that Disk Management will just show the size reported to it and the amount of data stored. As long as I am at or below the actual amount of storage on the drive, I'm okay. Let's say that the disk was 16GB and I used all of that space. A falsely reporting 32GB would show that I'm using 50% of the space when in reality I'm using 100%.

The program referenced above, seems to look at the space being reported by the chip, writes 100% of that amount then tries to read it. If it can read all of the data written, all is good. If not, some one lied about the size of the storage.