I somehow managed to justify (to myself) the purchase of 1GB usb drive for my keychain. Flash memory is approaching 1c/MB, which makes the argument for having a gigabyte on my keychain pretty compelling. The amount of time I spend promising to e-mail people stuff (or e-mailing *myself* stuff) overwhelms the cost of the purchase.
Being as cynical as I am, I never expected my full 2^30 bytes of storage. But I never expected the drive to complain “Full! Full!” when I only had 750MB onboard.
Of course (of course!) the problem was that I had some programming data on the drive (a very large number of very small files) which was causing the filesystem problems, and 20MB of data was taking 200+ MB to store.
That’s not interesting; that’s not the point of the post. The point is that once I discovered the problem, I wasn’t even mildly surprised. I chastised myself for being confused. The truth is, I should have factored in cluster size when calculating drive capacity.
This is why I hate computers.