OK, the geometry of the real physical storage on a rotating disk is also not so as we can see it on our screens, the controllers are getting so smart and can tell also anything we like rather then the truth. Happened to me recently, lucky the 16gb was just a well meant gift from someone. The files are still listed, they have the right size, but when it comes to retrieve them. Then data written to the drive under win start disappear somehow randomly when trying to write more then 4gb to it. On linux with dd, something starts often go fishy, since the number of sectors it can read out seem to be suddenly much smaller then needed for the 16gb. So one can buy 16gb stick, nice, new, very cheap!! It will display 16gb space on windows, one can write to it, read it. So in fact, what we see is kind of virtual stuff, the formating and size of the flash etc are often just some parameters stored in the controller.

This would be very hard to measure anyway, but the problem furthermore is that the sticks use flash files system, which is the manufacturers idea how to let the included controller read and write to all those chips and islands on them. So it first looks promissing to get at least some files together, so some cycles of addressing could be saved.

Some people had first quite right idea to defrg the flsh, since the wear leveling does normally not happen over the whole chip, but rather in smaller islands, their number depending on the kind and size of the chips involved.

Portable apps thumb drive