Samsung Galaxy S5 Unknown Storage Useage

[FaintDeftone]

Hey guys,

I've been out of the Android game for awhile now. My first smart phone was an HTC Inspire and after that I jumped to the iPhone 4S. Well now I decided to go back to Android and I picked up a Galaxy S5 since I was impressed with my wife's S3. Love the phone, but I have one question that I can't quite figure out.

The AT&T Galaxy S5 has 16GB of memory. The available memory is a little over 10GB due to all of the bloatware and OS files, of course. Well I went out and purchased a 64GB MicroSD card and expanded that bad boy greatly. I moved any apps that I can over to the SD card and all of my music is over there as well. Well, here is the problem.

Out of the 10+ gigs available on the device (not SD), I only have 4GB free and 7.5GB used. I should not have that much space being used AT ALL. If I look at the My Files app, the graph shows that I only have 2GB of app data and no documents, 4mb audio (the rest on SD), video, ect. I only have 33mb of photos. I should have no more than 2.4GB used total. What could possibly be taking up so much space? Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

 

[FaintDeftone]

Actually, I decided to restart the phone and it freed up a couple more gigs. I still have about a 3 gigs missing though. Thoughts?

 

[Rukbat]

Every app on the SD card has to have a link on internal storage pointing to it. (The OS expects the apps to be in internal storage.) There's a minimum file size, so even 2a 1 byte file uses the minimum storage size. If you have enough things linked, that can eat up quite a bit of storage. (Not 3GB, probably, but that's where some of it's going.) And some apps can't have the whole app moved, so only part of it gets moved, saving you only part of the space of the app. (It depends on how the app was written.)

Rule of thumb - buy a phone with enough internal storage for all the apps you're going to want to put on it and consider any app you can move (even partly) to the SD card as a bonus.