Samsung where did my storage go

[wtheu3976]

I have a Galaxy Xcover 4 with 16 GB internal storage. It's telling me that I'm running out of space with only 613 MB left. I only have three apps on internal storage, and I checked how much is actually being taken up and can only come up with 2.4 GB. So there's 13 GB that I can't see and don't know how to access or clean up.

 

[AugieTN]

A large part of your 16GB is taken up by the OS.

 

[nickdalzell]

Sometimes though you get a weird version of NAND failure. I have a Galaxy S5 that even wiped is showing the available storage at less than 1.5 GB. It's a 16GB device. I attributed it to the storage slowly going read-only. I heard SD cards can do it partially or fully as well. Unlike mechanical HDDs, solid state storage instead of having 'bad sectors' have bits go read only with enough write cycles. The storage seems to slowly go less and less. Maybe it's just how I'm perceiving it but someone explain the S5's issue.

Even with the OS taking some up, you should have somewhere around 5-6 GB of storage.

Keep in mind however that the data from apps is also counted. The setting that shows what app is using the most is not exactly true. One time I had my largest app showing as using only 500 MB of storage--YouTube Music. going one level deeper into the settings for said app showed it having 10 GB of 'data' aka its ability to download some music offline for convenience or the 'offline mixtape.'

So your apps can have some storage use that's not counted by the system.

 

[ocnbrze]

yep 16gigs these days is not much. most of that will be not only for app data and storage, but for the android os as well. your phone is 7 years old. maybe it is time to look for a new phone.....just saying.