Help Why NAND memory?

[Mikael Sandberg]

My Galaxy S5 has 16 GB memory, and I just install and install tons of games and apps, the memory seems never run out, the memory never cause any troubles since I see that all memory is just one big 16 GB memory partition. I do not think my Samsung phone use NAND memory.

However with some Chinese Android products, like my new Cube T8 tablet, I have seen that memory is split up into RAM memory, NAND memory and sometimes USB memory or Phone memory. There are lots of different memory sharing the total 16 GB space... When installing apps, they are all placed in the tiny 2GB RAM and I get often warnings that memory is full, then if the App allows it, I can move it to another part of the memory such as the NAND memory which still have free space.

WHY is this happening, why is the memory split up into several partitions, why could not the chinese manufactures handle the 16GB memory in the same way as Samsung do with their S5?

 

[glc]

RAM and NAND are completely different.
All phones have both.
Cheap Chinese tablets often partition the NAND into separate data and emulated SD partitions even though that
is not the Android standard.
All apps install into the data directory ( partition on your cheap phone ).

 

[solaris9123]

First of all,
NAND is a technology of flash memory, not a method of formating. Most all phones and tablets use a type of NAND flash memory, most commonly eMMC.
RAM stands for Random Access Memory which is completely different from flash storage.

The way a flash chip is partitioned for Android may vary with manufacturer must all Android devices have atleast three partitions. One containing the bootloader, one containing the Android system and one for user accessable memory. If you have a phone there is also a partition for the radio firmware.
So if you have a phone with 16gb of eMMC memory, in reality Android will take 3 or 4 gig, leaving about 12 for the user.
I've never heard of a device having bunches of small partitions but wouldn't surprise me

 

[mikedt]

My Galaxy S5 has 16 GB memory, and I just install and install tons of games and apps, the memory seems never run out, the memory never cause any troubles since I see that all memory is just one big 16 GB memory partition. I do not think my Samsung phone use NAND memory.

However with some Chinese Android products, like my new Cube T8 tablet, I have seen that memory is split up into RAM memory, NAND memory and sometimes USB memory or Phone memory. There are lots of different memory sharing the total 16 GB space... When installing apps, they are all placed in the tiny 2GB RAM and I get often warnings that memory is full, then if the App allows it, I can move it to another part of the memory such as the NAND memory which still have free space.

WHY is this happening, why is the memory split up into several partitions, why could not the chinese manufactures handle the 16GB memory in the same way as Samsung do with their S5?

Because for some reasons known to themselves that's what they sometimes do with cheapo. FWIW my original Samsung Galaxy S with Gingerbread 2.3 was partitioned in a similar manner, perhaps they still think it's 2011 and have never updated their practices for >4.0? And if it's an unknown device with no third-party dev. support, such as whatever this "Cube T8" is, you're basically stuck with it.

FWIW the Oppo Find 7(Chinese) originally came with partitioned storage, even though that was 16GB or 32GB internal. But users kicked up such a stink about it on their forums, they fixed it to unified with the Lollipop update. But you had to run it on a PC and it completely erased the phone. But before that third-party devs. devised a unified fix themselves for this phone.

Another thing, your Samsung S5 was probably originally around $500-600, this Cube if it's what I think it is, might have been about $60-80. Get what you pay for basically.

EDIT:
http://product.pchome.net/tablepc_cube_t8/444889.html
Cube T8, 499 yuan CNY, that's about a tenth the price of an S5, or the current S6.

 

[Mikael Sandberg]

Thanks, its more clear now.

Attaching a screenshot from Samsung S5, as I only see one memory area 16gb, and there is no option to shuffle apps between different memory areas since I find no NAND memory.

I checked my cheapy chinese tablet, it use 3gb internal memory, leaving about 8gb for NAND. I need constantly move around apps. The tablet also use dual SIM phone cards, could the "missing" 5gb memory be used there?

I also checked my android media player from Minix (from HongKong) it use 8gb internal memory and 6gb for NAND. I never need to shuffle apps from different memories due to bigger internal memory.

All these 3 devices on paper have 2GB RAM and have totally 16GB memory but do not know why 2GB/16GB memory differs so much between different devices.

 

[Hadron]

The total internal storage (which is all NAND flash) is partitioned into different areas. Some is allocated to system software, and how large that is depends on how large the ROM is and how much space extra the manufacturer allocates in case future system updates are larger. That's the manufacturer's choice. The rest is used by the /data partition (apps and app data) and /sdcard (media and general file storage - what you are referring to, confusingly, as the "NAND"). Prior to 4.0 those last 2 were separate partitions. Since 4.0 the norm has been to map both /data and /sdcard onto the same space, which allows the full storage (minus space used by system software) to be used flexibly.

So as others have said, the problem is that the cheapy Chinese manufacturers seem for some reason to think that they are still running Gingerbread (2.3) and have partitioned the storage accordingly. Nobody knows why they still do this. Given that they do this though, how much space they allocate for each partition is again the manufacturer's choice. In other words, using a 2011 partitioning scheme is a bad idea, but you can make it even worse by choosing the partition sizes badly.

I don't think there is any technical reason for the choices, just simple incompetence from a careless manufacturer.

P.S. Dual SIMs has nothing to do with the "missing" 5GB on one device - the software needed to handle that will not significantly increase the size of the ROM. They've just allocated 5GB for system software and system cache space, and probably a fair chunk of it isn't even used.

 

[mikedt]

Thanks, its more clear now.

Attaching a screenshot from Samsung S5, as I only see one memory area 16gb, and there is no option to shuffle apps between different memory areas since I find no NAND memory.

To make things a bit clearer:

Think of it like a PC's hard drive, that might be partitioned into C:, D:, E: etc. However unlike a PC, each partition in your Cube T8 China phone has a specific purpose, and can't easily be resized or allocated.

Apparently the manufacturer(unknown) of the T8 has left the default partition for apps too small. Maybe they were only expecting users to be playing Flappy Bird or something? But really they should have unified the whole thing, except for the system partition.