Why does my usb have less space than it says?

In your case, since the drive shows less space than it should, it’s probably just a partitioning issue or leftover boot info. Fixing that by repartitioning or reformatting is pretty routine and doesn’t usually harm the drive itself—unless the drive is physically damaged or counterfeit (which is rare but worth checking).

Why does USB have less space than it says? A quick warning based on real-world stuff: some cheap or fake USB drives might report a fake capacity (like 32GB when they’re actually much smaller). If that’s the case, no amount of reformatting will fix the capacity issue because the drive isn’t actually that big. You can test this with tools like H2testw — it’ll tell you if the drive is lying about its size.

If it’s just a partition problem, fixing it is pretty safe — just make sure to back up your data first. If the drive is a fake or physically messed up, then messing with partitions won’t help and could even make things worse.