Friend's odd flash drive issue

[The VCR King]

My friend recently bought an 8GB Sandisk Cruzer flash drive to use in class, but no matter what computer he plugs it into, instead of showing up in Windows Explorer as a removable disk, it appears in Hard Drives as a Local Disk. The drive works fine but I want to know why the computers are recognizing the flash drive as a hard drive.

 

[johnb35]

Supposedly its an issue with the sandisk drives.

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/All-Sa...sh-Drive-showing-up-as-LOCAL-DISK/td-p/309565

He must have an older one instead one of the newer ones.

 

[spirit]

I've got a SanDisk USB drive (I think it's an Ultra?) that also does this sometimes. Just seems to be a SanDisk thing but asides showing up as a hard disk instead of removable storage it works in exactly the same way.