774 MB reserved?

[piggylover]

I purchased the Galaxy tab s4 about a week and a half ago. I bought it from the Verizon wireless store. They only had the one with 64 GB of storage. I am really hoping they get the 256 GB version so I can upgrade as I only have a couple of GBs left for storage and I am not crazy about using SD cards because most of the storage is used by apps.

Anyway when you go into settings, then click device maintenance, and then click memory it lists how much RAM is being used for system and apps and under that how much free space is available and under free space it says 774 MB reserved. The specs say the S4 has 4 GB of RAM but with the 774 MB that is reserved and can't be used that leaves 3.26 GB of RAM. So what is this 774 MB being reserved for? Why not give us 5 GB of RAM if three quarters of a gigabyte couldn't be used so we would have 4 full GB of RAM? Also I thought 1024 MB equals 1 GB? So shouldn't we have 4096 MB of RAM?

 

[Itsa_Me_Mario]

RAM on Android doesn't work the same was as it does in Windows. This isn't a problem.

 

[anon(5719825)]

The GPU needs RAM as well and this will be true on any mobile device.

 

[ozron]

Yes, this is normal, 3.26Gig should be plenty, new version of Android good at management. You are correct about true size of RAM

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! I merged your duplicate threads.

Are you talking about RAM or Internal Storage? Those are different things. RAM isn't used for storage -- it's used to keep active apps in memory so that the system can swap between them quickly. The system determines which apps stay open in RAM, and if there isn't enough RAM available to open another app, it will determine which app to close out of RAM.

Show us a screenshot of what you're looking at: http://forums.androidcentral.com/ge...ide-how-post-screenshots-android-central.html

 

[piggylover]

Hi I know the difference between internal storage and RAM. My Galaxy Tab S4 has 64 GB of internal storage. There is also a version of it that has 256 GB of storage space which I am hoping Verizon will be offering soon as I bought my S4 there and at the moment only offer the 64 GB Internal Storage version.

Now on ebay there are sellers from South Korea selling the 6 GB RAM version with either 64 GB storage or 256GB storage. You can also choose WIFI only or the LTE version. Ideally I would love the 6 GB RAM/ 256 GB storage LTE version but I don't have eight hundred dollars and I am making making monthly payments to Verizon for the data plan and the tablet.

As far as the 774MB reserved here is a screen shot showing the RAM usage. What is the 774MB reserved for? I have had plenty of android tablets including a Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 and Galaxy Tab E and I have never seen any other tablet mention any RAM being reserved.

 

[B. Diddy]

Sorry, no offense intended. The term "free space" is what confused me, since I usually think of "free space" as referring to free internal storage space, not RAM. I actually find it a bit odd that Samsung calls the available RAM "available space."

In this classic article by the venerable Jerry Hildenbrand, he mentions reserved memory holding the kernel: https://www.androidcentral.com/ram-what-it-how-its-used-and-why-you-shouldnt-care. So it's possible the "system" part of the "System and apps" category refers to higher level system apps (like the launcher). In addition, he also mentions another area of reserved RAM intended for low level functions (minfree). You may not have seen this mentioned in any other device's system settings because the manufacturers thought the typical user wouldn't know enough about it or care.

 

[anon(10181084)]

I once used an app ony Tab S3 to see how much video memory my tab has and it shows the same value as the reserved memory. The OS uses the non-reserved memory. I assume it is same for the S4.