16Gb total storage, Apps only 3Gb, yet no more space

[Théophile Gaudin]

Dear fellow A3 users,

I'm very puzzled by my phone. My apps only occupy 3.3 GB and my phone has total storage capacity of 16GB. I removed all musics, downloads, photos and movies, I cleared any cache files.

And I only managed to get 1.7GB.

How do 3.3 Gb of applications take 14.3 GB of space?
Here is my memory breakdown in the storage menu:
Documents 7.05MB
Images 7.94MB
Audio 4.57MB
Videos 548KB
Applications 3.3GB

Total should make 3.3 GB, maybe 3.4GB, but not 14.3 GB!

How is this difference explained? It's quite relevant for me because every time I take a little bit too much pictures and movies with the phone, I can come close to memory limit pretty quickly and unavoidably my phone becomes slower and slower over time.

Best regards!

 

[Hadron]

Probably 4-6 GB is allocated to system software (or more accurately to the partitions that software lives in). As for the rest, what about stuff that doesn't fit into those few categories you list? If your phone isn't telling you about that then you need a better app than the phone provides to understand this.

I've 2 standard suggestions for these problems:

* Storage Truth: a tiny little app. It won't show you what's using the space, but it will show you the actual partition sizes and what space remains on them. This will give a clearer idea of how much space you have in total (i.e. after system partitions are taken into account).

* DiskUsage: provides a detailed, multi-level graphical view of what is using your space. That should help you identify the what is using the "missing" 6ish GB (because Samsung usually allocate a lot of space for the system software, so I would guess that you'll have about 10GB for the /data partition which is the user-accessible part of the storage).