Phone reports insufficient storage despite having a lot of free space

Tigrowski

Active member
Jul 19, 2014
36
0
0
The problem I'm having regards a cheap Chinese phone which is rebranded and sold in my country as Manta MSP94501 Easy Selfie. It runs Android 5.1 (with a KingRoot which I installed) and lately, it started very aggressively reporting lack of free storage - the widgets don't want to start, I get constant alerts that this or that couldn't be updated because of insufficient storage, that Google Play Services won't work until they're updated (and yet they don't want to be updated cause - again - insufficient storage), I can't install any new app either and the phone started getting a bit sluggish on top of all that.

The problem is, this phone has 8GB internal storage (half of which is allegedly the one for the phone and not the system) and is virtually empty (a few photos and videos, literally not more than a few apps). When you go into Settings->Storage, it reports that there's 4.51GB total for the phone storage, with 252MB free and yet the specific list below doesn't reflect that at all, as it reads: 3MB for Apps, 601MB for Photos and Videos, 40KB for Sounds, 348KB for Downloads, 24MB for Cache and 8.3MB for Other. As you can see, this does not sum up to 4.3GB at all - and the coloured bar above the list shows the storage correctly (that is, 3/4ths of it is marked grey as empty space - which is the truth!) but still, all the readings show otherwise, alerting about the 252 free megabytes.

What can I do? I've tried clearing the cache from recovery, clearing Google Play cache - but all to no avail. Here are also the pictures of what I described above (in Polish but those are pretty self-evident I think and I also translated above): https://imgur.com/a/YfTTJ

Any suggestions? :(
 
I may be an app that is misreporting it's storage stats. Have you tried a reset?
 
Hope you don't mind -- I moved this from the General News forum to the General Help forum.

Do you recall if the phone ever reported that it had 3 or 4 GB free, or has it always been a small number? If the latter, I'd wonder if the manufacturer cheaped out and put in less storage than advertised, then fooled the system into reporting that there was 4.5 GB free.
 
Sure, didn't notice I hadn't created it in the Help section in the first place, thanks! :)

Regretfully I don't remember if it had ever reported the 4GB actually being free. I managed to squeeze DiskUsage in after temporarily removing photos from the device, though, and it turns out, despite the system partition taking 4GB, the partition for the user also has an almost 2GB system folder in it with things like dalvik cache inside... Factoring in the caches and system apps (which, again, seem to reside outside of the "system partition"), the user actually has around 1GB free space out of the advertised 8GB...

Bought a microSD card today and moved all the photos and videos there and decided to leave all the internal storage alone so that it doesn't clog so easily again. Guess that's just the deal with these knock off phones, though I have to say it's the first time I see as little as 15% of the advertised free storage actually being free to use.
 

Latest posts

Trending Posts

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
956,489
Messages
6,968,523
Members
3,163,553
Latest member
IamHg