Root Storage not adding up!

[Pulse8]

Ok, we all know that we dont get 16gb of storage on a 16gb phone! I think the norm for an S3 is about 11.35gb.
So, with that in mind, Ive just added up all used space that my phone is reporting in settings/storage, and according to my calculations, I should have about 6gb of free space left. But its telling me that Ive only got 1.92gb! Can anyone tell me where the 'missing' 4+gb have gone?
I have attached (hopefully) a screenshot of my storage, and you can see that the dark grey, which is the available space, accounts for approx half of the storage space.

 

[KOLIO]

Not to nitpick,but,it's closer to 2GB & change.
Only reason I mention that is I see a similar disparity on my non-Samsung phone w/64GB of internal memory (less the O/S).
I also have approx. a 2GB discrepancy in the numbers.
I do not have an answer,but,perhaps this is SOP & someone will come along & explain what's up.

 

[KOLIO]

OK,I found an article that touches on a lot of what/where this 'lost" storage space may actually be:
http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/78339/android-4-1-1-system-is-consuming-4gb-of-my-memory

 

[Pulse8]

Thanks Kolio, I'll be glad when I get my replacement micro sd card from SanDisk, so at least I can throw some stuff onto that again!

Edit... Interesting article! Basically the manufacturers are getting away with lying! If they advertise a product as having 16gb of storage, they KNOW that Joe Public will think they will have 16gb of storage space to play about with. But they can smugly point out that actually...blah blah blah....etc etc....and get away with it! Reminds me of politicians ....professional liars! Nuff said!

 

[Unforgiven]

See if this will help out. It's a free app developed by a couple of mods here at AF. No permissions and it is for this exact problem.

http://androidforums.com/threads/qu...ruth-read-me-first-now-with-ram-truth.906249/

 

[MLSS]

See if this will help out. It's a free app developed by a couple of mods here at AF. No permissions and it is for this exact problem.

http://androidforums.com/threads/qu...ruth-read-me-first-now-with-ram-truth.906249/

I was just going to point the OP to this lol

 

[KOLIO]

See if this will help out. It's a free app developed by a couple of mods here at AF. No permissions and it is for this exact problem.

http://androidforums.com/threads/qu...ruth-read-me-first-now-with-ram-truth.906249/

WOW,how soon I forget these days.......
In the haste of performing new ROM installs on my phones (w/o data/app backups),I missed/forgot this.
Re-loading now........

 

[EarlyMon]

Thanks Kolio, I'll be glad when I get my replacement micro sd card from SanDisk, so at least I can throw some stuff onto that again!

Edit... Interesting article! Basically the manufacturers are getting away with lying! If they advertise a product as having 16gb of storage, they KNOW that Joe Public will think they will have 16gb of storage space to play about with. But they can smugly point out that actually...blah blah blah....etc etc....and get away with it! Reminds me of politicians ....professional liars! Nuff said!

How big was the hard drive in the pc you bought?

Do you get to use all of it for personal storage?

Did the ad or description tell you how much was left after the included pre-installed Windows and bloatware?

Are you aware that because of people newer to computers (a while back) not knowing what a byte was or what powers of two meant that now all pc storage is mislabeled in decimal?

1 GB = 1024 * 1024 * 1024

k is a thousand when measuring km or kg, but not powers of 2 machinery - here 1k=2^10 (1024).

But in the pc world, 240 GB gets inflated in decimal to 257 GB and then the box says, oh, you lose some to formatting, and no one complains. (Which, you do, but in this example, 17 GB are lost first, right off the top, due to sleight of math by marketing.)

File sizes in Windows Explorer say so many kB, or MB - but right click for properties and you get a different value for kB or MB.

If this were a pc, your 16 GB would have been converted to decimal, advertised as 17 GB and have a fair chunk taken up by Windows. You'd have to finish setup to see what's left for you.

Would you have felt lied to with a pc like that?

I doubt it.

You expect the system to need its own chunk of storage to operate and do things.

 

[KOLIO]

Thanks Kolio, I'll be glad when I get my replacement micro sd card from SanDisk, so at least I can throw some stuff onto that again!

I was just gonna mention there's more of the same in regards to external/removable SD Cards,in that you're not actually getting the marked/advertised amount of space.
On a 64GB SD Card,you're actually getting 59-60 GB of actual user available storage,some of it is reserved/lost to partitioning/etc....

As for actual internal storage,a few years ago,this "lost" storage was a concern,but,you almost have to go out of your way today to find a phone w/little to no internal storage available.
At least it seems,from 1st glance,most of the phones that still are lacking in the internal storage offer an SD Card slot to help things out.