USB Stick and Wasted Space
 

I've just bought one of those lovely USB Memory Sticks. It works great with Linux, no issues mounting it, but I've noticed that it seems to waste space on it. I had 72MB of data on it (capacity 512MB) and it was reporting 65% space used! I took the data off, formatted it, put the data back on and then it got it right: 16% used space.

I've noticed the same problem with my 256MB MP3 player. Every so often I have to format it to recover space.

My question is, does anyone else have this problem? I am using Suse 9.2 with a 2.6 kernel. I'm not sure if it's USB or the kernel's filesystem bit that is causing the problem, but any help would be appreciated.

umount your device and mount manually specifying the correct type yourself.

I have it in fstab as vfat, which from what I understand is correct for a fat16/fat32 filesystem. Is there a way to specify exactly? i.e. fat16 etc