I have some questions about how data is stored

1. Is the reason that a 16GB flash drive can hold less than 16GB of data because a percentage is taken out for system volume information? I’m guessing that part of the storage is taken up by data pointers and that’s why your PC says there’s less space than on the box
2. So if that is true, then when you quick format a device or just quick delete something, then does the computer delete the pointer and not really change all the data blocks back to 0s? I’m guessing that’s why you can still recover deleted files if their spaces on the media havn’t been overwritten yet.
3. And so if that is true, then does a non-quick format switch every bit on a drive back to 0s?
Answer #1
Moved from Off-Topic to Helpdesk.
Answer #2
I think it’s called shadow copy/storage. Here’s a page that shows how to remove it. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/166102-shadow-copies-delete.html
Files are recoverable with a single delete. In order to permanently wipe data, you need to wipe it 7 times. There are many programs that can do this (ie. CCleaner)
Answer #3
Why the storage is never what it says, and it goes for flash drives as well as hard drives, is manufacturers base the capacity on a Mb being 1,000,000 bytes and not the actual 1,048,576. So the more space you think you have, the greater difference between what you think you have and what you actually have. As for deleting files, they stay there but the info to where they are located is removed and the drive is told that it’s ok to write over that space again. I’m not sure if format does the same thing but in a mass way, but i’d assume it does since you can recover from a format.
Answer #4
This
... a percentage is taken out for system volume information?
and this
Why the storage is never what it says, and it goes for flash drives as well as hard drives, is manufacturers base the capacity on a Mb being 1,000,000 bytes and not the actual 1,048,576. So the more space you think you have, the greater difference between what you think you have and what you actually have. As for deleting files, they stay there but the info to where they are located is removed and the drive is told that it's ok to write over that space again. I'm not sure if format does the same thing but in a mass way, but i'd assume it does since you can recover from a format.
Answer #5
I think it's called shadow copy/storage. Here's a page that shows how to remove it. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/166102-shadow-copies-delete.html
Files are recoverable with a single delete. In order to permanently wipe data, you need to wipe it 7 times. There are many programs that can do this (ie. CCleaner)
No, I know what shadow copies are, that’s not what I’m talking about. Thanks for the input, though.
Why the storage is never what it says, and it goes for flash drives as well as hard drives, is manufacturers base the capacity on a Mb being 1,000,000 bytes and not the actual 1,048,576. So the more space you think you have, the greater difference between what you think you have and what you actually have. As for deleting files, they stay there but the info to where they are located is removed and the drive is told that it's ok to write over that space again. I'm not sure if format does the same thing but in a mass way, but i'd assume it does since you can recover from a format.
Thanks..
Answer #6
A full format is like a quick format but it also checks for bad sectors.
It does not write “0s” to the disk, so it is still possible to recover data.
http://superuser.com/questions/182629/what-does-format-do
If you right click a drive and go to Properties, you will see the capacity in both Bytes and GB.