Where are my 16GB???

[SmilezzProper]

On my HTC 8GB Inspire whenever I viewed Storage>Device memory the Total Space always said 8 GB. But on my S3 my Total Space is 12.05. That makes no sense because even w/the memory being used by Apps, Audio...etc it doesn't add up to 16GB. Am I missing something here?

 

[cedjunior]

Android (operating system) and TouchWiz.

 

[Hadron]

I don't have an S3 so can't check directly, but the usual thing is that the marketing people quote the total storage capacity of the phone, but fail to mention that part of that has been allocated for the system software and so what's available to the user is actually less.

There's also the infamous digital vs binary units scam. Computing devices use binary units, so 1 GB = 2^30, which is 1.074 billion bytes. A decimal Giga is 1 billion. So storage device manufacturers quote the capacities in decimal units because it makes them sound 7.4% larger than they really are. That's why a 16GB microSD only actually has 14.9GB usable space, and I imagine the phone makers use the same convention.

So my guess is that Sammy have allocated 3GB for system files, which then leaves 12GB for the user.

 

[XplosiV]

I don't have an S3 so can't check directly, but the usual thing is that the marketing people quote the total storage capacity of the phone, but fail to mention that part of that has been allocated for the system software and so what's available to the user is actually less.

There's also the infamous digital vs binary units scam. Computing devices use binary units, so 1 GB = 2^30, which is 1.074 billion bytes. A decimal Giga is 1 billion. So storage device manufacturers quote the capacities in decimal units because it makes them sound 7.4% larger than they really are. That's why a 16GB microSD only actually has 14.9GB usable space, and I imagine the phone makers use the same convention.

So my guess is that Sammy have allocated 3GB for system files, which then leaves 12GB for the user.

I've already theorised on this myself;

16gb partitioned into 3 drives,

1gb once formatted = 780mb for ram.
3gb once formatted = 2.x for os
12gb once formatted = 11.35 for user storage

All from one chip, saving valuable PCB space for other components.