16gb or 32gb

[dytkd]

Trying to pick one up hopefully today. I was contemplating getting an old used N7 for no more than $100. But then realized i have some best buy credit that i can use about $75. Then i thought maybe i can just get a brand new N7 using those $75, and just pay about 160 out of pocket...

One thing that I am concern about is the storage size. on my 16gb GS3 i only have 2.85gb available, and I have had it for a year now. Which makes me think that i need to get the 32gb. One thing i do have on my phone is videos that i recorded which i dont think i will be doing as much or at all with the tablet... what do you guys think?

 

[Golfdriver97]

Trying to pick one up hopefully today. I was contemplating getting an old used N7 for no more than $100. But then realized i have some best buy credit that i can use about $75. Then i thought maybe i can just get a brand new N7 using those $75, and just pay about 160 out of pocket...

One thing that I am concern about is the storage size. on my 16gb GS3 i only have 2.85gb available, and I have had it for a year now. Which makes me think that i need to get the 32gb. One thing i do have on my phone is videos that i recorded which i dont think i will be doing as much or at all with the tablet... what do you guys think?

Not really a fair comparison as TouchWiz is a memory hog, as is any carrier bloatware. How much memory is devoted to your apps.

 

[dytkd]

Not really a fair comparison as TouchWiz is a memory hog, as is any carrier bloatware. How much memory is devoted to your apps.

i was just cleaning up my storage but this is how the usage is spread out:
Apps 3.34gb
pics/videos 3.73gb
audio 312kb

Most of my music is currently on the cloud bc i used date to listen to it. I would definitely have more music downloaded into the app bc i am getting the wifi only option, and wont always be on wifi. .

 

[tg2708]

Just returned my 16gb to staples and picked up a 32 from gamestop. Is the 80 extended warranty for 80 bucks good. Im not for warranty extensions but a few views on it would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[Rule9]

If you play movies or games, keep a lot of music on tablets or some combination of those then get the 32. I have a 16GB tablet currently and I've noticed lately that complex games are getting a lot larger. ie. The Bard's Tale ate a whopping 3GB of space out of my 16, which is a big chunk out of a 16GB tablet for just one app. 2 years ago I was fine with 16GB based on how I use them, but times have changed for my usage.

 

[bjrosen]

I wouldn't even consider the 16G version, it's not enough. My gen 1 N7 has 16G and it's run out of space on occasion, my phone has 32G and it's never had a problem. Looking at where the space I went things that I didn't suspect, for example the Wall Street Journal had cached 1.3G of data.

 

[Diknak]

If you play games, you should get the 32gb because the 16 will be eaten up quite quickly. Games are taking up a lot of space now, so just a handfull of 3D games would kill your 16gb storage.

 

[dytkd]

not much of a gamer on my phone other than word with friend or candy crush. nothing really crazy...

 

[dytkd]

If you play movies or games, keep a lot of music on tablets or some combination of those then get the 32. I have a 16GB tablet currently and I've noticed lately that complex games are getting a lot larger. ie. The Bard's Tale ate a whopping 3GB of space out of my 16, which is a big chunk out of a 16GB tablet for just one app. 2 years ago I was fine with 16GB based on how I use them, but times have changed for my usage.

i do plan on having some music and videos/movies on my tablet specially for travelling. game, only word w friends or candy crush is really what i play, no major games. im starting to think that 32gb is gonna be my better option.

 

[Joe Joejoe]

16GB if you manage your space well.....I highly doubt they'll be releasing 10GB games for tablets any time soon. ask yourself....do you really need a bunch of games installed at once? even then, 2-3 games should keep you occupied long enough between internet connection loss when traveling...if you even experience a loss with all the wifi everywhere. as for movies, most of those are streamed nowadays, and should be deleted after watching anyways. video doesn't HAVE to be 720 or 1080p either, so you can still fit a ton of smaller videos.

if you have a PC at home, and you primarily use your tablet at home, storing files on your PC and accessing them over wireless means you don't need to dedicate any storage space on your tablet except to apps and games.

really when it comes to 720/1080p, even 32GB isn't enough if you want a movie storage device. that's 2-4GB per movie of high quality. that's about 10+ 2GB movies or several 4GB movies. if you need THAT many movies on your tablet at once due to lack of internet access somewhere for prolonged periods, you're probably going to burn through that amount of movies in short time anyways.

I'd rather save $40 and manage my space better or use external storage through wireless or usb.

another side effect is 32GB is going to make your tablet feel slower at times since you'll be spending more time waiting to copy data to it. copying 10GB of stuff at 58MB/s is going to take less time than copying 20GB of stuff to it. not to mention there will be more data to fstrim, which is definitely going to take longer on a 32GB.

 

[Rule9]

16GB if you manage your space well.....I highly doubt they'll be releasing 10GB games for tablets any time soon. ask yourself....do you really need a bunch of games installed at once? even then, 2-3 games should keep you occupied long enough between internet connection loss when traveling...if you even experience a loss with all the wifi everywhere. as for movies, most of those are streamed nowadays, and should be deleted after watching anyways. video doesn't HAVE to be 720 or 1080p either, so you can still fit a ton of smaller videos.

if you have a PC at home, and you primarily use your tablet at home, storing files on your PC and accessing them over wireless means you don't need to dedicate any storage space on your tablet except to apps and games.

really when it comes to 720/1080p, even 32GB isn't enough if you want a movie storage device. that's 2-4GB per movie of high quality. that's about 10+ 2GB movies or several 4GB movies. if you need THAT many movies on your tablet at once due to lack of internet access somewhere for prolonged periods, you're probably going to burn through that amount of movies in short time anyways

Just storing movies alone on my current 16GB isn't bad and I don't load high-res either. It was adding games and other stuff on top of that that keeps making me crunch the limit of my storage. No the games aren't 10GB, and no I don't need a ton of games all at once. But if I add the 2-3 games as you yourself just suggested, just 3 fairly hefty games alone is eating upwards to 6GB of 16. I call that a huge chunk of total storage on a 16GB (minus OS) tablet my friend.

I'd rather save $40 and manage my space better or use external storage through wireless or usb

.

Been there done that. I'd rather spend the $40 because for one, that's a pittance of an amount of money to spend extra that will pay for itself in convenience 100x over the course of a year or so.

another side effect is 32GB is going to make your tablet feel slower at times since you'll be spending more time waiting to copy data to it. copying 10GB of stuff at 58MB/s is going to take less time than copying 20GB of stuff to it. not to mention there will be more data to fstrim, which is definitely going to take longer on a 32GB.

Been there done that as well. On my 16GB tablet it takes me longer to keep swapping out smaller chunks of movies than it would to load them all in one shot. I was right where you are right now trying to convince others that 16GB is fine. 2 years ago it was. Now it's not enough - once again speaking specifically of my usage which is movies and a few high def games. MC2 on my device was 400MB. MC4 on my device is now more than double that size. A lot of the larger high def titles are around 2GB on average.

So let's break that down assuming you have around 12-13GB of space after the OS. Subtract maybe around 1GB for a modest app selection. Add 3 gameloft titles - and let's be real here. Most people who do play games don't just load your suggested "2-3" - so let's say about 5-6GB. That leaves you about 5-6 GB left for movies. Even if I were to stay true to the average size of 700MB low-res video files, you're looking at about 7-8 movies at the MAX and now your storage is completely full. realistically though, your movies will vary in size with 700 being the low point. So now you're down to 6-7. Forget music, or taking videos or snapping pictures, or cached storage, etc.
Even were I only to add those cute little candy crunch or angry birds style of games rather than the high def ones I prefer, that's only going to what, leave me room for 1-2 more movies?

I'm not saying it can't be done. I've just managed for the last year to do so. But I'm tired of just managing to.

 

[Joe Joejoe]

Just storing movies alone on my current 16GB isn't bad and I don't load high-res either. It was adding games and other stuff on top of that that keeps making me crunch the limit of my storage. No the games aren't 10GB, and no I don't need a ton of games all at once. But if I add the 2-3 games as you yourself just suggested, just 3 fairly hefty games alone is eating upwards to 6GB of 16. I call that a huge chunk of total storage on a 16GB (minus OS) tablet my friend.

.

Been there done that. I'd rather spend the $40 because for one, that's a pittance of an amount of money to spend extra that will pay for itself in convenience 100x over the course of a year or so.



Been there done that as well. On my 16GB tablet it takes me longer to keep swapping out smaller chunks of movies than it would to load them all in one shot. I was right where you are right now trying to convince others that 16GB is fine. 2 years ago it was. Now it's not enough - once again speaking specifically of my usage which is movies and a few high def games. MC2 on my device was 400MB. MC4 on my device is now more than double that size. A lot of the larger high def titles are around 2GB on average.

So let's break that down assuming you have around 12-13GB of space after the OS. Subtract maybe around 1GB for a modest app selection. Add 3 gameloft titles - and let's be real here. Most people who do play games don't just load your suggested "2-3" - so let's say about 5-6GB. That leaves you about 5-6 GB left for movies. Even if I were to stay true to the average size of 700MB low-res video files, you're looking at about 7-8 movies at the MAX and now your storage is completely full. realistically though, your movies will vary in size with 700 being the low point. So now you're down to 6-7. Forget music, or taking videos or snapping pictures, or cached storage, etc.
Even were I only to add those cute little candy crunch or angry birds style of games rather than the high def ones I prefer, that's only going to what, leave me room for 1-2 more movies?

I'm not saying it can't be done. I've just managed for the last year to do so. But I'm tired of just managing to.

for $40, you could buy a pretty large USB drive, definitely far more than 32GB. you can tuck it right behind the tablet in a case, or tape it to the back of the tablet or just let it dangle if it's small enough. hundreds of GB of storage for the same price or less....with little to no nuisance. after all, I doubt many people will be holding a tablet in their hands for the entirety of a movie...so you can just plug the drive in when you want to access video.

what I'm trying to point out, is 32gb still isn't enough for a person that wants to use their tablet as a video watching device, especially high quality video. 32GB is still in that gray area. sure, 32GB is much easier to manage, but there's still managing going on. unless you plan on being unable to access the internet for days at a time, 16GB should be enough. and if you do plan on that, then you'd be better off with a USB drive, because at some point that 32GB isn't going to be enough either if you're consuming that much media on the go. so it's be simpler to just load up your entire music collection and tons of videos on a USB drive, rather than picking and choose what you can fit on the 32GB of internal storage.

maybe I'm just better with what I choose to store on my devices. I don't need even a 4GB mp3 collection for a 2 day or even week long trip. you couldn't even listen to that much music if you played it non stop for the entirety of that trip.

there's also another benefit of external storage. not only does it keep your internal storage clean, it also increases performance in multitasking since reading a movie while reading/writing from browsing the web from the internal storage alone, will split bandwidth between these tasks, especially if it's a 1080p movie. another gain is when you write files to internal storage while doing nothing else, they'll be more likely to be contiguous, which will mean the fastest read speeds possible. by reading from internal storage rather than writing to it, you ensure that your files remain contiguous. so install all your apps one at a time while doing nothing else while installing, then add nothing else to the drive. it will be running under best case scenario indefinitely. I treat internal storage on tablets like read only memory, and that keeps your tablet in top shape.

 

[Rule9]

for $40, you could buy a pretty large USB drive, definitely far more than 32GB. you can tuck it right behind the tablet in a case, or tape it to the back of the tablet or just let it dangle if it's small enough. hundreds of GB of storage for the same price or less....with little to no nuisance. after all, I doubt many people will be holding a tablet in their hands for the entirety of a movie...so you can just plug the drive in when you want to access video.

what I'm trying to point out, is 32gb still isn't enough for a person that wants to use their tablet as a video watching device, especially high quality video. 32GB is still in that gray area. sure, 32GB is much easier to manage, but there's still managing going on. unless you plan on being unable to access the internet for days at a time, 16GB should be enough. and if you do plan on that, then you'd be better off with a USB drive, because at some point that 32GB isn't going to be enough either if you're consuming that much media on the go. so it's be simpler to just load up your entire music collection and tons of videos on a USB drive, rather than picking and choose what you can fit on the 32GB of internal storage.

maybe I'm just better with what I choose to store on my devices. I don't need even a 4GB mp3 collection for a 2 day or even week long trip. you couldn't even listen to that much music if you played it non stop for the entirety of that trip.

there's also another benefit of external storage. not only does it keep your internal storage clean, it also increases performance in multitasking since reading a movie while reading/writing from browsing the web from the internal storage alone, will split bandwidth between these tasks, especially if it's a 1080p movie. another gain is when you write files to internal storage while doing nothing else, they'll be more likely to be contiguous, which will mean the fastest read speeds possible. by reading from internal storage rather than writing to it, you ensure that your files remain contiguous. so install all your apps one at a time while doing nothing else while installing, then add nothing else to the drive. it will be running under best case scenario indefinitely. I treat internal storage on tablets like read only memory, and that keeps your tablet in top shape.

I used this exact same argument over a year ago. Extremely similar points to yours, all of it. In fact I used to stop just short of calling those people insisting on 32/64 GB foolish and ignorant. Fast forward to today and I've come to see this argument as a bandaid solution. It's an extra piece of hardware to carry around, and requires mucking about with I'd rather just not do. All it served to do was convince myself so I'd feel better about the fact that I already bought my 16 instead of the larger models. While 32GB still isn't enough, it's still more. Give me about 500GB of storage on board with no external crud and I'd be happy. But since I can't have it, I'll take the 32GB over the 16GB any day.

Hey, I get it. Instead of buying the larger model, I can put that money towards an external drive for X amount of dollars, and do this and that etc etc etc with it. I get it. I just don't want to be bothered you see. It's $40 I don't really care about, so I'll get the bigger model with more built in storage.

I really don't think you're any better than me at what choosing what I store on my tablet if that's what you were implying by that statement in the 3rd paragraph bro lol. Especially when we're arguing over what... 40 bucks? I almost spend that on coffee every 2 weeks man. It's a pittance, so I'll take the 32GB and screw around a little less with swapping files or extra devices.

There's a lot of things in life I could make do with by paying less for the smaller model, but I don't when I know paying more means I'll have to "make do" less. This isn't about what I "need". I know I don't "need" a 32GB version. I also don't "need" the tablet at all.

 

[RaiderWill]

My Two Cents..
I have a thread very similar to yours.. I kept my 16 Gb for less than 24 hours... Something told me to call Walmart and see if they by chance, got in any 32 Gb's that morning (7/26) they got in 7.. it was the best move I ever made.. I'm already Rooted & Romed.. and, backing up the stock image, stock image with my apps installed, and the Custom ROM image, I've gone from the 26.1 you have available out of the box down to 21.1 Gb.. Exactly 5 Gb used up in 48 hrs. ( It would have been down to 5.6 Gb's with the 16 Gb ) I have yet to do anything like Grand Theft, Most Wanted, Asphalt 8, Etc.. or Movies.. or Pics... If I would still have the 16 Gb, I would be down to less than 5 sorry Gb's after installing just a couple of decent games with No Movies and basically, No Pics.. NO GOOD.. and your telling me I can DOUBLE my storage for $40.00 bucks? cut $2.00 a day for the 20 days a month most folks work.. Just $2.00 bucks.. ( Bag of chips, soda, burger...) and you have the $40.00 extra back in 30 days.... Why have an HD Resolution Screen and no space to store and enjoy content on it?

Not to mention.. for those that have a life.. and are on the go... storing your stuff in "The Cloud" EATS YOUR DATA! if you are not going to tether, and just use your Nex-7 at home..so be it.. but the cloud on the go will cost you a hell of a lot more in the long run than $40.00 more for 26.1 Gb of USABLE storage to keep your stuff local.. and available WITHOUT an internet connection..

Get the 32.

 

[kyoo]

picked up a 32gb - had a 16gb original nexus7 - not that data intensive but i was getting closer to needing more storage after about a year of ownership

 

[Ricardo Contreras]

I think i will go with the 32GB because yeah you can use a OTG and a usb memory but you will need to carry that around. I will use my tablet to read, games, i will play emulators. Don't know about watching movies but i will watch some yeah. But 32gb is the way to go yeah. I was thinking of getting the 16gb, OTG and the USB memory but i would need to have it with me all the time.