Last night, I was copying a movie file over 1GB in size to my flash drive and Teracopy always fails to complete the operation. It's an 8GB flash drive so I was pretty sure space issues was not any concern. The copy finishes but the file, when read back, does not match the original file. I then tried to reformat the drive and tried copying the file again but I still can't copy the file.
After a few minutes of googling, I found out that some USB flash drives being sold nowadays are fake. Windows reports that the drive is, say 8GB, but in reality, it's not.
A fake drive will deceive you by displaying the 'false/oversize' capacity when you connect it to your PC, however it will NOT be able to store the data to the stated capacity.
Symptoms:
You copy a big file to your drive. Later when you try to open the file, it's corrupted.
Why?
Because the file was not really completely copied due to the drive's 'REAL' size limitation.
A few things you can do after purchasing:
1. Check the serial # of the drive online.
2. Copy big files and try to open them on the drive after copying. Do it one at a time for each big file. If you have 32GB drive, start with a 30GB file and work your way down.
You may be surprised that your 32GB is actually just a poser 4GB drive. But don't worry, you are not alone.
