DON'T LEAVE POSITIVE FEEDBACK ON THE PEN DRIVE YOU BOUGHT ON EBAY WITHOUT READING THIS.
Ebay is a wonderful global world and I hope I'm not making you think that you shouldn't buy there or that everything chinese is bad.
now my story and advice:
I needed a usb flash memory for easly share information between computers. I was looking on ebay and found out some really cheap and nice ones with 4 GB memory and good writing speed for around $12 USD.
The user had a 100% positive feedback with lot of buyers saying the product was good and fast delivery.
So I bought one and 7 days later it was in my home ( and I live a far away from china). I formated it on windows xp and tryed it with some small files (mistake 1) . Every thing was fine so I gave a positive feedback to the user (mistake 2).
A few days later when storing some big files and reading them they appeared as corrupted.
I searched for this problem and found a software - iformat .
It fix and formats your usb flash drive to its original size. The pen drive problems were fixed but it had only 462 MB.
Some google search show I'm not the first to have this problem:
"There was a taiwaness news article which suggested that the controller provider (ie, the IC design house) helped flash card/USB flash drive manufacturers in China to cheat the size":
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.digitimes.com.tw%2Fn%2Farticle.asp%3Fid%3D0000050613_B6TLI47WP40NCFW4Q9HFB&langpair=zh%7Cen&hl=pt-BR&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
TO STOP THIS AND AVOID THIS PROBLEM PLEASE FORMAT YOUR PEN DRIVE WITH IFORMAT BEFORE LEAVING A POSITIVE FEEDBACK.