USB Flash Drives

These procedures will guide you to format your USB flash drive to NTFS in Windows XP:

1. Right-click on my computer and then select manage to open device manager
2. Open disk drive, right-click on the USB Flash Drive and then select properties
3. Select policies tab, and then select optimized for performance
4. Press OK
5. The NTFS option shall be enabled in the Windows format.

Note 1: About Windows default format tool, please refer to question 6

All storage products will display a lower than stated memory capacity. The reason is the general used method for calculation of megabyte used by manufacturers:

The calculation for a 32GB is done like this:

32GB=32.000.000.000 Bytes, 1024Byte = 1KB

32.000.000.000/1024= 30.250.000KB, 1024KB=1MB

31.250.000.000/1024= 30.517,58MB, 1024MB=1GB

30.517,58/1024= 29,8GB

Therefore a 32GB USB Flash Disk will show 29,8GB under Windows.

Before format, please backup all your data and make sure you select the correct drive. The following steps will show you how to use device manager to format.

1. Right-click on my computer and select manage.
2. Click on disk management.
3. Right-click on your correct device, and select format. If you need to format NTFS or exFAT file format, please refer to question 6.
4. Confirmation dialog will be showed on screen, click yes to continue.
5. Choose your file format and click ok to continue.
6. Confirmation dialog will be showed on screen again, click cancel to give up format process, click ok to continue your format process.

Please make sure your device is correctly inserted into the connector. If your computer still can't detect your device, please reverse the connector and insert it again.

If your computer detects your device, the first time driver installation process will be shown in the right corner of screen. If your computer device autorun function is enabled, the dialog window will show on the screen. Then you can choose which method you want to open your device. You also can use device manager to check your device status.

Another device may have been assigned with the same drive letter, therefore you have a drive conflict. If you want to solve this problem, please follow the instructions below to reassign USB Flash drive initial.

1. Click Windows start icon.
2. Select run.
3. Enter diskmgmt.msc and click on the ok to open disk manager.
4. Right-click on USB flash drive, then select change drive letter and paths.
5. Click on the edit.
6. Reassign the drive letter to another one that is not used by another device.
7. Click on the ok to save your settings.

We strongly recommend you to connect your USB flash drive to the rear side USB ports on your computer, and please avoid using an USB hub or extension cable. Please do not use several USB devices at the same time to avoid the possibility of insufficient power supply. Please make sure you use the safety remove option whenever you would like to disconnect USB Flash drive from your computer. You can refer to question 12 perform safety remove procedure.

You can verify if your computer is supporting USB 2.0 or not by following instructions:

1. Right-click on my computer.
2. Select device manager
3. Expand universal serial bus controllers node, and verify if you can find USB 2.0 or enhanced host controller interface in it.

If your computer is not USB 2.0 ready, please refer to the motherboard user guide to verify if your motherboard support USB 2.0 standard or not. In some cases, you will need to install the driver that is packaged with your motherboard driver CD. If you are using Windows operation system, please make sure that you have updated your system with the latest service pack version.

A low-speed rate of 1.5 Mbit/s (~183 KB/s) is defined by USB 1.0. It is very similar to "full-bandwidth" operation except each bit takes 8 times as long to transmit. It is intended primarily to save cost in low-bandwidth human interface devices (HID) such as keyboards, mice, and joysticks.

The full-speed rate of 12 Mbit/s (~1.43 MB/s) is the basic USB data rate defined by USB 1.1. All USB hubs supports full-bandwidth.

A high-speed (USB 2.0) rate of 480 Mbit/s (~57 MB/s) was introduced in 2001. All hi-speed devices are capable of falling back to full-bandwidth operation if necessary; they are backward compatible. Connectors are identical.