Why does internal free storage on android device shows less space when connected to PC than the one it shows on mobile?

[krkeshav123]

I have seen this thing in Android phones that the free storage shown is less on computer than the one which is shown on Android OS. Usually the gap is between 5 to 8 GB. Any idea anyone?

[FakeFBI]

2 minutes ago, krkeshav123 said:

I have seen this thing in Android phones that the free storage shown is less on computer than the one which is shown on Android OS. Usually the gap is between 5 to 8 GB. Any idea anyone?

on the pc it prob doesnt realize that android s is storage so it shows free space

[jaslion]

One uses the 1mb = 1000kb system and the other uses the 1mb = 1024kb system.

[jj9987]

Tested on my 128 GB OnePlus to see what the difference is.

 

Android shows 53.98 GB used of 128 GB, which is 74.02 GB free.

Windows shows 68.9 GB free of 107 GB, which is 38.1 GB used.

 

That's 15.88 GB in used space and 5.12 GB difference in free space and 21 GB difference in total capacity. All the numbers are bigger on the Android side.

 

Looking at the partition table (in the spoiler below), we can see the numbers are correct for the internal storage partition (mounted at /data/media), which is the one that is available to Windows. Android however can see the whole table. If we count in all the other partitions, that are located physically on the device (e.g. tmpfs is fully in memory), we basically get closer to the remaining 20ish gigs in total capacity. But not all partitions are shown here though - kernel, recovery, bootloader (and second system partition on A/B devices) are located separately and not always mounted.

Spoiler

OnePlus:/ $ df -h
df -h
Filesystem        Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root         2.7G  2.6G  4.1M 100% /
tmpfs             2.7G  1.6M  2.7G   1% /dev
tmpfs             2.7G     0  2.7G   0% /mnt
tmpfs             2.7G     0  2.7G   0% /apex
/dev/block/dm-1   992M  880M   96M  91% /vendor
none              2.7G     0  2.7G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/block/sda17  108G   38G   69G  36% /data
/dev/block/sda2    27M  3.7M   22M  15% /mnt/vendor/persist
/dev/block/sda16   93M   72K   90M   1% /op_odm
/dev/block/dm-2   4.3M  4.3M     0 100% /apex/com.android.media@301400200
/dev/block/dm-3    18M   18M     0 100% /apex/com.android.media.swcodec@301400900
/dev/block/dm-4   836K  808K   12K  99% /apex/com.android.tzdata@293100000
/dev/block/dm-5   4.6M  4.6M     0 100% /apex/com.android.conscrypt@301300300
/dev/block/loop7  1.6M  1.6M     0 100% /apex/com.android.resolv@290000000
/dev/block/loop8   96M   96M     0 100% /apex/com.android.runtime@1
/dev/block/loop9  232K   36K  192K  16% /apex/com.android.apex.cts.shim@1
/dev/block/loop10 256M   90M  157M  37% /system/india
overlay           256M   90M  157M  37% /system/product/app
overlay           256M   90M  157M  37% /system/product/priv-app
overlay           256M   90M  157M  37% /system/reserve
overlay           256M   90M  157M  37% /vendor/overlay
/data/media       108G   38G   69G  36% /storage/emulated

 

 

tl;dr - windows can only see the internal storage, android can see everything.

 

9 minutes ago, jaslion said:

One uses the 1mb = 1000kb system and the other uses the 1mb = 1024kb system.

No, that's not right, at least not in the way you think. Physical disks are generally advertised to have gigabytes (base 10), but (as far as I know, all) operating systems work on binary systems, hence they use the gibibytes (1024), resulting in a smaller number than advertised. For my case, 120 gigabytes (thats base 10) would be about 111 gibibytes (base 2).

 

My table is displayed in 1024 system (-h parameter sets it to K=1024). When set to K=1000, /data size is 116G and /dev/root is 2.9G.