Need OLD cheap low capacity USB Sticks!! - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: GlennSprigg
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2020, 01:11:18 pm
content: My Missus, & her family/friends are into Embroidery Machines. And if she/they can't find/buythe designs/files they want, then I fabricate them using specialized software on my PC/Laptop.The problem is that although they are 'relatively' current machines, they have limitations on thesize of the USB sticks that they will accept!!!You can not put greater than 100 design files on each one, (although each file is only 10kb - 50kb).And they will not accept USB sticks greater than 4Gb in capacity!!!There are a myriad of links on the likes of 'eBay' that I have purchased from in the past, for CHEAPold style USB sticks, of say 1gb to 4gb capacity. Some are down to $2 to $5 each. Even 1/2 gig is fine!!!However, they seem to be harder & harder to find now! Does anyone know of a cheap source forsuch low capacity sticks??? (We need lots!! xxx).

author: envisionelec
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2020, 01:40:10 pm
content: I'm no expert on USB flash formatting but could you format a partition to only be 500MB on a 1GB stick?

author: OwO
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2020, 01:52:28 pm
content: I find small micro SD cards to be much easier to get, so I'd look into whether a USB card reader + micro SD would be accepted by the machine.

author: GlennSprigg
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2020, 02:05:00 pm
content: Quote from: envisionelec on January 13, 2020, 01:40:10 pmI will try that tomorrow. Thanks.

author: GlennSprigg
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2020, 02:06:07 pm
content: Quote from: OwO on January 13, 2020, 01:52:28 pmI will look into that option too!!! Thanks.

author: Someone
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2020, 10:56:35 pm
content: Quote from: GlennSprigg on January 13, 2020, 01:11:18 pmSlightly more detailed than the above reply:If 4GB is the "magic" limit where it stops working then its probably a formatting problem rather than a physical device compatibility. 4GB is the maximum size for a FAT16 volume.You can test this by taking the same small 2GB or smaller drive and formatting it in FAT16, verifying it works, then formatting it in FAT32 and checking it again.

author: Rick Law
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2020, 01:15:53 am
content: Quote from: Someone on January 13, 2020, 10:56:35 pmI had a similar issue. FAT16 vs FAT32 is a good point and likely will solve your problem. If that doesn't work, there is one more thing to try: Use some old partition resizing tool to resize your partition down.For my Windows setup and other bootable USB's, I edit the partition size down to cut down on boot time since large disk size takes significantly longer to boot. When experimenting, long boot time is a killer . I use Partition Magic 8 or gdisk (from Norton Ghost /2003) to modify the partition size on my 32gb SD card(which I have more than a dozen) for use with SD->USB adaptor. So my "boot disk" is about the smallest practical for that boot configuration. For example, my DOS boot has a 1.2mb single partition (on a 32gb card), my Win7 (32 bit) setup 32gb USB boot-stick is set to an odd 2.5 gb single partition, there about.For stuff of that era, there may be other dependencies when doing that. I have an old PC that boots USB as USB1 till it loads far enough for Windows driver to kick in. With that one, I can pretty much edit partition table to my heart's content and even have multiple partitions; whereas, with PC of slightly later generation, I cannot have multiple partitions visible (which is the default for USB stick when access as USB disk) but the active partition size can be anything from around 1MB to the whole SD "disk".I've not tried using MSDOS' fdisk. With PQMagic and gdisk both work, I have no reason to believe that fdisk may not work.