Help Phone Storage and Internal Storage

[Shkelqim]

My phone has 16 gb storage but when i try to download something it says Insufficient storage available what to do please help ?

 

[The_Chief]

Your 16GB of storage is USER memory, which is for photos, videos, music and files. Apps are installed into SYSTEM memory (or RAM), which seems to be full. You can try deleting old SMS/MMD messages and the call log: those are notorious memory hogs. Depending on your phone, you may not have that much RAM to begin with. The operating system eats up a lot of that, and your apps eat up more. Evaluate your installed apps and see if there are any you can afford to uninstall.

 

[Shkelqim]

Is this Normal or my phone has problems ?

 

[Guggy]

Is this Normal or my phone has problems ?

Read the post above you.
This is normal on phones with small amounts of RAM or memory

 

[The_Chief]

What phone do you have, exactly? Once we have the model, we can easily determine how much RAM it has.

 

[Hadron]

"Internal storage" and "phone storage" being different and yet both being the same size (but with different amounts free) seems very odd. If they were different sizes I'd assume you had one of those odd phones that still uses distinct /data and /sdcard partitions (normal for android versions older than 4.0, but still used by some budget Chinese models for reasons nobody can understand), but both claiming 16 GB is funny.

There's a little app in the Play Store called Storage Truth. It's very small, so hopefully you'll be able to install it. If so, can you run it and post the output here? That will give a clear picture of what your actual storage situation is - the system menus, in trying to be "user friendly", are often very unclear as to what's actually going on (what are "internal storage" and "phone storage" for example?)

The weird thing is the coloured bar in your "internal storage" results: it shows the green (Apps) part as smaller than the grey (Available), but below that says that Apps is almost 6 GB and available is under 700 MB. If installing an app would leave you less than some pre-defined limit, which is commonly 500 MB, available then the app will refuse to install, so if you are trying to install a large app that could be a problem if the "693 MB available" is the reality, which I suspect may be the case. But if that is the problem you should be able to install Storage Truth as that is tiny.

 

[Guggy]

"Internal storage" and "phone storage" being different and yet both being the same size (but with different amounts free) seems very odd. If they were different sizes I'd assume you had one of those odd phones that still uses distinct /data and /sdcard partitions (normal for android versions older than 4.0, but still used by some budget Chinese models for reasons nobody can understand), but both claiming 16 GB is funny.

There's a little app in the Play Store called Storage Truth. It's very small, so hopefully you'll be able to install it. If so, can you run it and post the output here? That will give a clear picture of what your actual storage situation is - the system menus, in trying to be "user friendly", are often very unclear as to what's actually going on (what are "internal storage" and "phone storage" for example?)

The weird thing is the coloured bar in your "internal storage" results: it shows the green (Apps) part as smaller than the grey (Available), but below that says that Apps is almost 6 GB and available is under 700 MB. If installing an app would leave you less than some pre-defined limit, which is commonly 500 MB, available then the app will refuse to install, so if you are trying to install a large app that could be a problem if the "693 MB available" is the reality, which I suspect may be the case. But if that is the problem you should be able to install Storage Truth as that is tiny.

Mine seems to require 200mb free on the storage "screen" to allow me to install any type of app.

 

[Hadron]

Yeah, that was common earlier, but we've seen 500 MB as the limit in quite a lot of phones lately. I'd say if you have a 200 MB limit you should count yourself lucky .

In the old days it was 10% of the /data partition, which meant that my first Android gave this warning at 15MB but after I repartitioned the internal storage to enlarge that partition(*) the warning would occur at 33 MB.

(*) Do not ask how to do this! It is very specific to the device, and is the sort of thing you can only consider if you have an active and experienced development community for the device. When in 2010 your flagship device had a whole 147 MB for app/data storage but 250 MB for the ROM, and an AOSP ROM could fit in less than half of that, then this was an option. These days the devices that have large development communities are not going to be the ones that need that sort of desperate hacking, and devices that might benefit from such things are unlikely to have significant development for them, so this is pretty much a historical oddity now.

 

[Shkelqim]

"Internal storage" and "phone storage" being different and yet both being the same size (but with different amounts free) seems very odd. If they were different sizes I'd assume you had one of those odd phones that still uses distinct /data and /sdcard partitions (normal for android versions older than 4.0, but still used by some budget Chinese models for reasons nobody can understand), but both claiming 16 GB is funny.

There's a little app in the Play Store called Storage Truth. It's very small, so hopefully you'll be able to install it. If so, can you run it and post the output here? That will give a clear picture of what your actual storage situation is - the system menus, in trying to be "user friendly", are often very unclear as to what's actually going on (what are "internal storage" and "phone storage" for example?)

The weird thing is the coloured bar in your "internal storage" results: it shows the green (Apps) part as smaller than the grey (Available), but below that says that Apps is almost 6 GB and available is under 700 MB. If installing an app would leave you less than some pre-defined limit, which is commonly 500 MB, available then the app will refuse to install, so if you are trying to install a large app that could be a problem if the "693 MB available" is the reality, which I suspect may be the case. But if that is the problem you should be able to install Storage Truth as that is tiny.

Look!

 

[Hadron]

Eek! /data is the partition that apps and app data live in, and it's tiny! In fact I've not seen such a small /data partition in several years. If that's the setup then it explains your problem all right (you've been sold a very badly specified/set-up device).

But then how was the previous image claiming that there were 6GB of apps installed? Even if this device let's you move them to sd that only moves part of the app, so you couldn't install that much. Was there more output from storage truth (if you scroll down)?

 

[Shkelqim]

Eek! /data is the partition that apps and app data live in, and it's tiny! In fact I've not seen such a small /data partition in several years. If that's the setup then it explains your problem all right (you've been sold a very badly specified/set-up device).

But then how was the previous image claiming that there were 6GB of apps installed? Even if this device let's you move them to sd that only moves part of the app, so you couldn't install that much. Was there more output from storage truth (if you scroll down)?

I don't have 6gb of apps installed i think it's fake my phone Is X-BO Chinese product

 

[munemsahariar]

how much ram you have?

 

[Hadron]

Yes, I don't know why it's claiming to have 16GB storage. The only possibilities are that it's talking about the SD card but mislabelling it as phone storage (which I would call "misleading" at best), or it's outright lying. Either way it doesn't give much confidence in the manufacturer.

From the Storage Truth output and your post I assume this is an X-BO V6. That model has 4GB of installed storage (as do all X-BO I've looked at), which includes the operating system, firmware & cache partition as well as the user's app/data space. One site selling the phone says that it has about 1GB available to the user, which is consistent with Storage Truth's report of a 786 MB /data partition.

So I'm afraid that you simply have a phone with very little storage, and you will have trouble putting many apps on it. If it lets you move apps to SD move any you can (not all will allow you to move them) - that will help a bit, but as it only moves part of the app (and none of the app data) you will still have problems with space sooner or later, probably sooner. If you can root it there are other things you can do which will let you move more stuff, but I think you will struggle with this phone unless you can get by with installing very few apps.

 

[munemsahariar]

do you want to increse your ram and internal stoarge ? if yes. use roeshoft ram expander for incresing ram and use external to internal for internal stoarge . these two apps need root. also you need big sd card.you found these from here.

roeshoft ram expander:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.swapit.expander.de&hl=en

external to interna:http://www.apk20.com/apk/41392/

kingroot:http://www.kingroot.net/wap/download

framaroot:http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/alephz...release/framaroot-1-9-3-android-apk-download/

 

[Hadron]

Bear in mind that you cannot genuinely expand RAM. You can use other storage as "swap space", which is what that app is for, but frankly I don't see any point: other storage (internal or SD) is much slower than RAM, so if swapping is used heavily it will slow the phone, and if it isn't then you didn't need it in the first place. Personally I'd just let Android manage the RAM itself (you should not have a lot of free RAM, that's not the way that Linux memory management works).

 

[scary alien]

Bear in mind that you cannot genuinely expand RAM. You can use other storage as "swap space", which is what that app is for, but frankly I don't see any point: other storage (internal or SD) is much slower than RAM, so if swapping is used heavily it will slow the phone, and if it isn't then you didn't need it in the first place. Personally I'd just let Android manage the RAM itself (you should not have a lot of free RAM, that's not the way that Linux memory management works).

^^^ Quoting again for truth!

RAM is hardware--pretty sure there haven't been any Android devices whose RAM can be upgraded or expanded.

Also, rooting your device is not a trivial or inconsequential endeavor--you should also carefully weigh the impacts of that effort before you start going down that road...

 

[munemsahariar]

in previous i have 1.5 gb ram. using roeshoft ram expander my ram converted into 4gb using sd card. after this, i wont found any lag or slow. hd games are works fine without lag. phone is not laggy. sorry for my english.

 

[scary alien]

in previous i have 1.5 gb ram. using roeshoft ram expander my ram converted into 4gb using sd card. after this, i wont found any lag or slow. hd games are works fine without lag. phone is not laggy. sorry for my english.

You ended-up with 4GB of SD card swap, not 4GB of RAM, though...a much, much slower memory medium.

Apples (SD card) and oranges (actual RAM)...

 

[munemsahariar]

You ended-up with 4GB of SD card swap, not 4GB of RAM, though...a much, much slower memory medium.

Apples (SD card) and oranges (actual RAM)...

i wont understand your message . i swap my sd card space to virtual memory (ram) . what the slow? ram boosts the phone and app . i tried this and nothing found like lag.


please post your message understandly. sorry for my english .

 

[scary alien]

No worries, @munemsahariar--I don't doubt that the app you mentioned does help your device run better, but I just wanted to make sure that folks understood that no app can actually give you more RAM since that's a physical resource.

A RAM "expander" does not give you more RAM--it's giving you more swapping space on much slower external memory. RAM itself is very fast, but limited in size. External memory is much slower, relative to RAM, but is obviously larger. Another device with larger, true/actual RAM will significantly outperform a device running a RAM "expander".

Hope that helps .

 

[munemsahariar]

No worries, @munemsahariar--I don't doubt that the app you mentioned does help your device run better, but I just wanted to make sure that folks understood that no app can actually give you more RAM since that's a physical resource.

A RAM "expander" does not give you more RAM--it's giving you more swapping space on much slower external memory. RAM itself is very fast, but limited in size. External memory is much slower, relative to RAM, but is obviously larger. Another device with larger, true/actual RAM will significantly outperform a device running a RAM "expander".

Hope that helps .

i saw 4 gb ram in my stoarge, after rebooting my phone.if your answer is true. i am nothing to say. interesting matter is i have 9 gb free space internal stoarge on my phone. i install all apps in internal. you must say internal is fast then external?

 

[scary alien]

Oh, yes, internal storage would indeed be faster than external storage.

And true RAM is even faster than internal storage.

 

[munemsahariar]

thanks for informing bro. i won't like lag.