Different size 32GB primes WTH!? Did ASUS rip you off for nearly 1GB?

[leo1969]

I am very gald I found this posting as I thought I was going crazy.

I bought TF300T for my olderst daughter with 27.15 GB of Total Space (under Internal Srorage in Settings). We were very happy with it and I got one more, exactly the same (s/n CBOKCT04xxxx, similar to the first one). But it showed 26.38GB. Almost entire GB less. I've emailed tech support, they took 2 days to reply, than 2 more days to reply to my second repoly. They seem to not understand the issue. Keep in mind, I am talking about TOTAL storage, not available storage. The bottom line, I coudl not handle it anymore and returned it to BB and picked up another brand new unit. Guess what, it also has 26.38GB.

WHo can explain it to me? I am an IT professional, I do not expect 32GB on a formatted drive and do expect the system to take up some space. But the TOTAL available space has to be the same coming from the manyfacturer.

Is there anybody who can explain it to me? It is my first posting, not sure if tech support monitors it, but I just bought it today and I might just return it.

Other than not knowledegeable tech supprt, variance in storage size, I am very happy with the pad.

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[Frederuco]

I am very gald I found this posting as I thought I was going crazy.

I bought TF300T for my olderst daughter with 27.15 GB of Total Space (under Internal Srorage in Settings). We were very happy with it and I got one more, exactly the same (s/n CBOKCT04xxxx, similar to the first one). But it showed 26.38GB. Almost entire GB less. I've emailed tech support, they took 2 days to reply, than 2 more days to reply to my second repoly. They seem to not understand the issue. Keep in mind, I am talking about TOTAL storage, not available storage. The bottom line, I coudl not handle it anymore and returned it to BB and picked up another brand new unit. Guess what, it also has 26.38GB.

WHo can explain it to me? I am an IT professional, I do not expect 32GB on a formatted drive and do expect the system to take up some space. But the TOTAL available space has to be the same coming from the manyfacturer.

Is there anybody who can explain it to me? It is my first posting, not sure if tech support monitors it, but I just bought it today and I might just return it.

Other than not knowledegeable tech supprt, variance in storage size, I am very happy with the pad.

First welcome to the forum.

Secondly, there is a very simple explanation for this, so here goes.

Understand that when it has a 32 GB chip in it, it is 32,000,000,000 bytes. Most operating systems do not count in 10 based math, but 2 based math. This means that every 1000 is actually 1024 (2⁸=1024) and this is the closest they can come to 1000. So, taking the 32,000,000,000 and converting to GB is actually starting with 29.8 GB. This is the same reason a 1 TB HD formats to 931 GB.

On a windows PC, the C:\ drive is typically the ONLY drive there is. All your system files, user files, temp files, and virtual memory (pagefile) are stored on the C:\ drive.

Android is not set up this way. There is some genius to this because you can jam pack the internal storage with files, and the device will still run. On a windows computer, if you fill the C:\ drive, it will not run very well because it does not have room left for the OS to operate.

There are separate partitions for:
/recovery (where the system recovery is installed) typically 50-100 MB
/boot (where the boot up file are) and is typically 300-600 MB
/system (where the OS is installed) and is approximately 300-600 MB
/cache (temp files and virtual memory) and is approximately 300-600 MB
/data (this is the rest of the room and is your /sdcard directory).

If we take the total (29.8) and subtract the other partitions, we come up with about 26.5 GB. It varies from firmware to firmware how much is in each partition.

Keep in mind that the M$ Surface tablets that have a 32 GB internal storage ship with about 15-16 GB of usable after the OS is installed.

[leo1969]

Thank you, but I do know my binaries and woork in IT. My question was - how come we have different sizes? I do not expect 32G even withoiut the OS. But I do exoe3ct the same amount of free space on all of my 3 brand tablets.

[MikeS]

Different chips with different amounts of faulty sectors on them?

Maybe some of the 32G units have 64G chips that failed dismally at that level and were reconfigured to 32G, resulting in a slightly different available formatted capacity.

I've worked with 256M PMICA flash cards before (and ones certified for industrial, high reliability use at that) that were in reality 512M ones that had been 'marked down' to 256M during final test due to a large number of faulty memory cells - very nice, until you try to install an image file and discover that your 256M is not necessarily contiguous.

[leo1969]

Yuks. But I am not sure as the two of them have the exact the same available storage. Maybe lately when they partition (does it apply to droids?) they allocate more for OS than before? But woudl not one expect to be able to find out about it?

[Frederuco]

It could be due to different sizes for each of the partitions. Keep in mind the total available space is just what is in the "data" partition.

You can use the app Partition Table to see your partition sizes. I do not belive it needs root to run.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....cls.partition