What's taking up all the storage?

[Android Central Question]

I keep getting the message that I don't have enough storage left to do anything. I keep going through the process of cleaning out my cache etc like it recommends. That frees up maybe 200 mb or something. Not much use.

This tablet claims to have 16 gigs of storage. DiskUsage says I have 9.5 gigs used. According to my math skills, that should leave me with 6.5 gigs of storage. Instead, at the moment, I have slightly less than 1 gig of storage left, after cleaning out everything I could.

Is there some bizarre secret hidden blob of space that Huawei uses that they don't want anyone to know about? Is my only option to blow away what's on this tablet and install some other stock Android image?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Which tablet do you have?

 

[Bill Boxall]

It's the Huawei MediaPad M3 Lite 10.

 

[B. Diddy]

Can you show a screenshot of the Settings>Storage menu? http://forums.androidcentral.com/ge...ide-how-post-screenshots-android-central.html. Is DiskUsage saying that 9.5 GB total is being used, or 9.5 GB of the available free space? The OS and any bloatware typically use up about 5-6 GB of storage, so that would lead to about 10-11 GB of free available space. If you're using 9.5 GB of that free space, that might be why it says you only have 1 GB left.

 

[Bill Boxall]

I believe DiskUsage always shows the total used out of what is available. Here is the screenshot of it.

Now, one thing I should point out is I did a system update since I took that screenshot, and the System data dropped from 3.29 gigs to slightly under 2 gigs, and of course the total amount on the storage card changed commensurately. I'm guessing that amount was the downloaded update, ready to be applied. But, the original roughly 5 or 6 gigs of missing storage is still missing.

 

[Bill Boxall]

I installed DiskUsage on my Pixel 2 with 64 GB here, just to compare.. I'm starting to think there is always going to be space that is taken up, but isn't displayed. DiskUsage on my Pixel2 shows total storage of 52.1 GB, which is an aggregation of 17.9 GB for apps, 902 MB for media and 33.3 GB free space. So instead of showing the advertised 64 GB of storage, it shows 52.1. Am I to assume then that this is normal? That the above 9.5 GB instead of 16 GB on my Huawei tablet is normal? No device ever shows the amount of storage that's advertised? And the discrepancy is out by that many gigabytes? Just seems like a huge differnce, to me.

 

[ManiacJoe]

So instead of showing the advertised 64 GB of storage, it shows 52.1. Am I to assume then that this is normal?

Yes, this is normal. The quoted 64 GB is raw storage before the file system is put onto the card. The file system takes a small but noticeable amount of space for its overhead. (Different file systems vary in the amount of overhead they take up.)

 

[B. Diddy]

9.5 GB free out of 16 GB total internal storage isn't that unusual -- it depends on how much bloatware the manufacturer preinstalls on the device (which typically can't be uninstalled unless you root the device). The OS itself typically takes about 3-4 GB of storage, depending on the device and version of Android, so another 2-3 GB is taken up by bloatware.

So the 9.5 GB is how much space is technically available to the user out of the box. The 3.29 GB of "System Data" that DiskUsage is reporting is presumably additional data that system apps accumulate, which is separate from that 6 GB chunk of storage used by the OS and bloatware.

 

[Rukbat]

The storage in the device is partitioned (intro you wouldn't believe how many partitions (I've seen 12 or more). One partition is named something like userdata (the exact name depends on the manufacturer) - that's all the storage available to you without rooting. And the system uses a few bits of that for itself.

If you run a terminal app, so you can run the Linux OS that Android runs on, and enter du, you can see a list of partitions. It's sad, really - unless you're running a phone with a lot of storage (like a 128GB or larger phone, userdata isn't all that large, and all the stuff needed top make the device work uses most of the storage. (And there's really no other way of doing it - you get about the most user space any particular device can give you and keep running.)