Thumb drives always fail on my computer.

[mralbert]

I purchased a couple of generic 1 TB thumb drives and a 128 gig thumb drive. I can only fill them with about 50 gigs of files and then they wont take any more. I thought this was just due to the generic nature of the drives until I purchased what seemed like a higher quality generic thumb drive from what I would consider a reputable on line business and the same thing happened again. I reloaded the drivers on my Windows 10 OS but the problem didn’t go away. I tested the integrity of the Windows 10 software and it was determined to be fine. I find it hard to believe that all these generic drives are defective in the same way and think it is my computer somehow. I hesitate to buy a name brand thumb drive since the same thing might happen again and I would be out the higher cost of that drive.

Any ideas.

Thank you for your help,

Mark

[Bruce]

G’day Mark and welcome to the forums.

What brands, and how many, are we talking about with the failed USB sticks?
Check what formatting type they have; FAT32, NTFS, or exFAT?
Usually cost per device is a good indicator of quality, what are you paying for them?

I’ve also seen reports of sticks being advertised at a certain GB but end up being much less GB’s.
Especially cheap, Chinese knock-offs, and online sellers.

[Bruce]

@mralbert - still with us?

[georgeks]

Thumb drives do not appear in explorer unless they have been assign a drive letter.

If you are unfamiliar with diskpart, try disk management:
Press Win + R.
Then type diskmgmt.msc, and hit the Enter key to launch Disk Management.