I have a usb flash drive that SM2 A350 just doesn’t like. It is a 512Mb drive, formatted in FAT32. I plug it in an all the files are visible. I select one and it seems to transfer fine but when I hit start, it either goes back to ready, at which time I hit start again, then it either starts processing but never does (just keeps spinning) or it crashes the touchscreen and I have to power down and start over. The files work fine on other flash drives so it’s not a file problem, it is definitely the drive not behaving. I’ve reformatted the drive a couple times and tried new transfers of the files.
Anybody seen this and have any suggestions?
It’s not a big deal, I can use other flash drives, but if anyone has a solution, I’d appreciate it.
512MiB or 512GiB? 512MiB are pretty old, and 512GiB is pretty fraudulent right now.
512MiB is very small. I think I have one, but I’d have to check the bottom of my drawer. The SM Original shipped with a 16GiB drive. If it’s 512MiB, it’s probably old enough to go bad. And small enough that it’s not worth your time to figure out.
512GiB are available, but cost ~$50US. If you spent significantly less, you probably got a fake. The fake ones work fine for a while, then randomly fail.
Unfortunately, determining the difference is not straight forward. It’s technical, and depends on your OS. If you still want to figure it out, which OS are you using?
Yes, a pretty old 512Mb drive. Formatted to fat32 on both Win10 & Win11 (i don’t think there is a difference between 10&11, just what I have). From what I’ve read, SM has to have Fat32 formatted drives. Anything over 32Gb will not format to fat32 with Windows natively without a third party app. Hence pulling out the old drive which has more than enough room for SM projects. It is old but still seems to function with no other problems except for SM. Chkdsk reports no errors.
Agree it’s not worth a lot of time trying to get it to work, just due diligence in asking if anyone has seen similar issues and a solution.
Are you absolutely 100% sure that it’s formatted to FAT32 and not FAT16? Given the size of the drive and Windows’ habit of trying to be “helpful”, it may have used the latter. In theory, a system that can read FAT32 should be able to read the older, smaller FAT16, but in practice I’m no longer surprised by any weirdness in the Snapmaker firmware.
Yes, FAT32; at least that is what Properties shows and what I’ve picked for the reformats. Reformatted several times on different computers just to see if there was a FAT32 difference for some bizarre reason. I’m just puzzled by this strange artifact.
I’m curious if you have tried reformatting it, and then trying again? All FAT file systems are notorious for failing.
Habe you tried another USB Drive ? Will this fail too?
Just Invest the 3$ and get a new one…
When doing the format, did you do the quick format? Try the non-quick.
The quick format just writes the interesting bits, and doesn’t zero out the rest of the drive. Non-quick will zero the drive, and fail if there are bad areas. If it fails, pitch it.
Try changing the cluster size