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Help Internal Storage Not right? Only 9GB?

dsstrainer

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Jun 20, 2011
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So the Motorola Photon is supposed to have 16GB onboard storage right?

But Settings -> Storage shows:

Application Storage:
Available space: 2.75GB

Internal Storage:
Total Space: 8.92GB


My math is a bit fuzzy and I don't know if that 8.92 should be added to 2.75 but somewhere here there is no adding up to 16GB.

Anyone else noticing this?
 
I believe it's definitely 2.75+8.92=11.67GB, and then the rest is used by Webtop app and other stuff.

I concur. After I installed some apps onto the internal storage, I went to check if the Total internal storage space was affected, but it wasn't. I had mentioned in shawheim's thread a couple weeks ago that my guess is that there is 5.4GB of bloatware and UI software.

Thing is, I think it's much like any storage. Even with a 32gb or 16gb microSD card, once you've formatted the card, there's about 1-2 less GB alone after it's formatted, so we're probably looking more around 4.4-3.4GB of internal storage being taken up by the UI and bloatware.
 
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The reporting apps for storage are limited as to what partitions they see, typically they show only a few.

There are likely between 6 and 9 filesystems (aka partitions) on your phone to make it all happen - for the bootloader, the phone radio firmware, the protected areas (like /system that rooters so love to get to) and so forth.

That will add pretty much to 16, less formatting (which ought not be a large percentage).

You may notice similar "errors" in your ram tools, showing less than the actual silicon. Some is used by the Android ramdisk and memory mapping of hardware input/output, for example. (And the tools themselves run in ram, so don't expect any two tools to agree on the actual ram anyways.)

Anywho - the silicon is really there, the tools try to report what's useful to you.

Think of seeing how much disk space you really have after installing Windows. Just like buying a laptop, if you bought an "X_sized" GB hard disk, after Windows, drivers and the built-in so-forth, you're left with "X_sized - whatever" as your apparent free space.

Only difference here is they don't expect you to ask the real questions.

Bloatware is likely small, relatively speaking, unless you activate any of it and let it download the rest of itself. (usually the way)
 
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For the curious, here is the exact partition breakdown:

Yep, it's 16GB of total internal storage, partitioned among the system, Webtop, etc.

Disk /dev/block/mmcblk0: 15.9 GB, 15914762240 bytes

~500MB for /system
~3GB for /data
~650MB for /cache
~1.3GB for /osh (webtop)
~350MB for /preinstall
~9GB for /sdcard (internal storage)

And a lot of little partitions dividing up the space even further.

source: bane449 @ xda-developers - View Single Post - [Q] Is it really 16gb internal???
 
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It seems like Moto likes to partition it's memory. It has like 3GB for apps. Then it has 8.92GB for "media". When you're allowed to move apps to sd, in reality, the phone just moves it to the "media" partition. That's why when you go to move the app it says media instead of sd. SD card ends up being just for music, pics, videos and apps that can cache information to it.
 
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It seems like Moto likes to partition it's memory. It has like 3GB for apps. Then it has 8.92GB for "media". When you're allowed to move apps to sd, in reality, the phone just moves it to the "media" partition. That's why when you go to move the app it says media instead of sd. SD card ends up being just for music, pics, videos and apps that can cache information to it.

I actually LOVE this concept because when you plug the phone into a computer via USB, the internal memory is still identified as a separate drive (from the external microSD).

What I've done, is just copied all the folders/files that have been added to the internal memory (8.92) and pasted to a backup folder on my removable hard drive, which would include the apps that have been moved to the SD (e.g. media drive)!

At first, I thought the 3gb dedicated specifically to apps and the 8.92gb (for anything else) would be an issue...until I realized that when moving apps2SD, it would just move the apps to the 8.92gb storage. That's still technically part of the "internal" storage...but the best part is being able to access that information (without rooting) and copy and paste onto a cpu drive, just in case!

Assuming Motorola continues with this trend, the only filer/folder that might not translate from my current MoPho to the next phone I upgrade to is the camera folder (and in that case, I think it's an Android component, not phone specific, so I think it'd still be the same folder used for future camera pics). That means, next upgrade, I take out the 32gb card and just put it into my next upgrade phone without worrying about having files/folders that aren't compatible with the next phone! Perfect!
 
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Anyone else noticing this?

I popped in a microSD card because I wanted to be able to store a lot of music on the phone. But it took me forever to figure it all out.

As it turns out, my 32GB microSD got named /sdcard-ext instead of the standard /sdcard. I guess this means that the photon auto-mounts a /sdcard from the internal storage. LAME because there are so many apps which don't support "/sdcard-ext".
 
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I popped in a microSD card because I wanted to be able to store a lot of music on the phone. But it took me forever to figure it all out.

As it turns out, my 32GB microSD got named /sdcard-ext instead of the standard /sdcard. I guess this means that the photon auto-mounts a /sdcard from the internal storage. LAME because there are so many apps which don't support "/sdcard-ext".

I actually disagree that it's lame.

There are 3GB of internal storage for apps alone. 8.92GB of internal storage for whatever you need to use it for. If you move apps to the SD, it goes in the 8.92GB of storage (that's the internal storage that's identified as /sdcard).

I'm not seeing how that would be lame at all because you can still use the "app storage" not made specifically for apps, to store the apps. That's exactly what I wanted. What's the problem with that?

In fact, I challenge ANYONE to download enough apps (that you actually use) to fill up 11.92GB (app storage and internal storage).
 
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I actually disagree that it's lame.

There are 3GB of internal storage for apps alone. 8.92GB of internal storage for whatever you need to use it for. If you move apps to the SD, it goes in the 8.92GB of storage (that's the internal storage that's identified as /sdcard).

I'm not seeing how that would be lame at all because you can still use the "app storage" not made specifically for apps, to store the apps. That's exactly what I wanted. What's the problem with that?

In fact, I challenge ANYONE to download enough apps (that you actually use) to fill up 11.92GB (app storage and internal storage).

"No one would ever need more than 1 megabyte of address space".
- Bill Gates (I believe he was talking about DOS?)


Point is, I need space for things OTHER than apps. For example music, or videos. Google Music can stream music from the net, but when I experience connection issues it means that half of my library can't play. Sure, I can pin the songs so that they play without a connection - BUT GUESS WHERE THEY GET STORED! That's right, /sdcard. Not /sdcard-ext. Nowhere in the settings (that I've found) to even change that option.

Don't forget that the camera app stores pics in /sdcard too. Can't find a way to change that either. Not a problem if you upload over wifi... I wonder which card mounts when you choose to mount over USB.
 
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"No one would ever need more than 1 megabyte of address space".
- Bill Gates (I believe he was talking about DOS?)


Point is, I need space for things OTHER than apps. For example music, or videos. Google Music can stream music from the net, but when I experience connection issues it means that half of my library can't play. Sure, I can pin the songs so that they play without a connection - BUT GUESS WHERE THEY GET STORED! That's right, /sdcard. Not /sdcard-ext. Nowhere in the settings (that I've found) to even change that option.

Even if they do pin the songs to the /sdcard, why not just move them afterwards? Pretty simple, if you ask me. From what I understand, whenever you stream from Google Music, once it's set to play the file off line, it creates a mp3 file. And if that mp3 gets created on the sd, just move it to the external sd later.
 
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Even if they do pin the songs to the /sdcard, why not just move them afterwards? Pretty simple, if you ask me. From what I understand, whenever you stream from Google Music, once it's set to play the file off line, it creates a mp3 file. And if that mp3 gets created on the sd, just move it to the external sd later.

If you move it over, it re-downloads the songs /sdcard the next time you start the app. Google Music doesn't play from /sdcard-ext.
 
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If you move it over, it re-downloads the songs /sdcard the next time you start the app. Google Music doesn't play from /sdcard-ext.

Oh, I see. Yeah, I can see where that would be an issue for you then. Hopefully, now that Motorola is owned by Google, they'll make the settings available to re-direct to the external SD.
 
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Ya, this sucks. I just realized that my titanium backups went onto the internal 'sd'. not what i want. Cant seem to change it either. I agree with drex and others that the internal storage being an SD is a cool 'feature' but i think that should come along with the ability to customize default locations easier. The unfortunate part of this is that is left up to the app developers who will likely code towards industry standards, not this 'feature' that moto has chosen for us.
 
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Ya, this sucks. I just realized that my titanium backups went onto the internal 'sd'. not what i want. Cant seem to change it either. I agree with drex and others that the internal storage being an SD is a cool 'feature' but i think that should come along with the ability to customize default locations easier. The unfortunate part of this is that is left up to the app developers who will likely code towards industry standards, not this 'feature' that moto has chosen for us.

Yeah. Maybe it is something that they can tweak in the future. I don't know personally, but I wonder how difficult it will be to "tweak" the software so that the external SD becomes the default (once it's recognized to be available), but if there isn't an external SD, it goes back to the internal. And then also having a way to go into the settings to set either internal or external as the default.

Maybe something for all of us to send to Motorola as a "future" software update they can work on? For me, the way it currently is works fine, but for those of you that have expressed reasons why it's a problem...I can definitely see how it would be important.

btw, to TigerC10, I opened my Google Music app for the first time today (for some reason, my PowerAmp wasn't working, so I had to uninstall and reinstall) and I noticed that it collected/recognized all the music that I had on my external SD card. There was one option I saw in settings (Hide unavailable music) that is untoggled for me. Other than that, I don't know how it saw my music on the external sd, as I don't recall ever having sync'd my home music to Google Music.
 
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Glad to see this thread as I was pulling out my hair trying to move stuff to my SD card.

This is no bueno - on my Evo I installed hundreds of apps. Plus I like having Titanium on a card, separate from the internal storage as an insurance policy. If the phone has a hardware failure, at least you have a chance at recovering an SD card. I once had a WinMo Diamond that used internal storage, no SD card...beautiful little phone but I was always nervous about losing my data.

So am I understanding correctly - any A2SD program will not install to the SD card...it all goes into "Internal Storage"? So the best we can do is periodically back up "Internal Storage" to our SD card? Bummer. :(
 
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