Forma 30 books take up 1.5 G of space?

[bookandtea]

Reset my Forma to factory settings tonight. Installed 30 books. Happened to check settings/device and apparently only 6.4 GB out of 8 GB is available. Seems odd. These are all shortish novels, not 30 Lonely Planet guides.

Is there a way to troubleshoot what happened to my missing storage space?

Thanks!

[stumped]

probably you never had 8gb available user space to begin with
remove them all, check free space then.
subtract 6.4 to see how much the books were using
if you artill curious, add them one at a time, and take measurements
NB dunno for sure but kobo probably use the same sales trick as hard drives where xxGb is calculated using 1000 in place of 1024, thus you never get what you thought you were paying for
see here
https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/suppor...ards-194563en/
if that is in use, then your 8gb is really only ~7.5 to begin with

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by bookandtea

Reset my Forma to factory settings tonight. Installed 30 books. Happened to check settings/device and apparently only 6.4 GB out of 8 GB is available. Seems odd. These are all shortish novels, not 30 Lonely Planet guides.

Is there a way to troubleshoot what happened to my missing storage space?

Thanks!

Of that 8GB, some of that is used for the firmware & the factory firmware and system files.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by stumped

same sales trick as hard drives where xxGb is calculated using 1000 in place of 1024, thus you never get what you thought you were paying for

Likely most of the "missing" space is the operating system (OS). The quoted memory on all phones, tablets and ereaders is the chip capacity before formatting and excluding the OS. The Partition information, Partition and the formatting all use up storage even apart from the OS.

The physical disc makers are not exactly being dishonest. Memory chips are directly addressed and have an exact power of two of storage. A ten bit address is exactly 1024 locations, a count of 0 to 1023. Disk drives have tracks, like cassette tapes. A CD or DVD or BD has actually only a single spiral track like an LP or 45 disk, though start at the inner.
Long ago the HDD had a fixed number of sections or sectors per track. A Floppy had a hole to indicate the first. There might not be an even number of tracks, platters (all the tracks across all the platters at one head position is a cylinder) or sectors per track, so the total is not a power of two. Then also there might be bad sectors or reserved space for them.
Since the linear velocity of the track is highest at the outer edge you can fit more sectors at the same data density. A floppy on the Victor 9000 / ACT Sirius 1 did this in 1981 by varying the rotational speed. CDs, DVD, BD actually gradually slow the rotational speed when streaming audio or video to keep the data density constant. Modern HDDs will vary the data clock to have higher density and thus more sectors as you move from the inner to the outer edge. Real transfer speeds are thus higher at the outer edge.

All this means is that Chips are usually multiples of 1024 and any physical rotating storage medium is an arbitrary number of bytes. RAM doesn't need "partitioned" and "Formatted", persistent storage does, which loses some storage.

Actually 2 G Byte RAM or Flash is really 2 Gibi bytes.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) began to collaborate with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to find acceptable names for binary prefixes. IEC proposed kibi, mebi, gibi and tebi, with the symbols Ki, Mi, Gi and Ti respectively, in 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#gibi

So technically the Drive makers are honest (and in the detail they explain about formatting) and the Chip makers are inaccurate.

[stumped]

ok but bottom line is customer buys a 1TB drive, installs it, windows tells them they have ~930Mb, customer feels ripped off, writes a bad review or send it back...

the larger the drive, the more shocking that headline 8% discrepancy looks.

If kobo use the same measurements ( & I cant be bothered to check) , an empty 8GB Forma will actually be 7.3 GB, and that's before firmware etc takes its chunk

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by stumped

ok but bottom line is customer buys a 1TB drive, installs it, windows tells them they have ~930Mb, customer feels ripped off, writes a bad review or send it back...

Unfortunately true. However all a drive maker can do is say formatted capacity is less. Which they do. The amount free depends on partition type, filesystem type and how much if any is used by EFI if it's a boot drive.

I think I posted on one of the Libra threads how much space there is before the books are added. I've never seen a phone or tablet advertise the real free space, only total RAM and Flash. Some can't upgrade to a newer Android because there isn't even enough free space when new!

[stumped]

FYI, just checked, my Forma has 11 normal sized books on it, and shows 6.7Gb available

[Barbara1955]

On phones & Tablets a LOT of space it those Crappy Apps they add you Cant remove & Worse they Auto Update grrrr

[Quoth]

I'm really weird. I don't want Google Voice Assist, Google Browser, Google Maps and YouTube or Google Gallery. I only use Data on WiFi, and only to use camera with Viber (I use Viber on the Laptop normally).
I use Jota for text. A 3rd party ebook reader (Pocketbook, not Kindle or Kobo apps), Mort Audio Books, Mort Music. Folder player and VLC for local video from camera. The only stock apps I use are the built in FM Radio and phone/SMS. I use a replacement clock, calculator, Firefox browser with uMatrix script blocking (WiFi occasionally), Open Camera, a barcode scanner that NEVER auto opens URLs (preview and can save in Jota or Firefox tab). It's evil the way Google controls Android, which they bought in.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by stumped

ok but bottom line is customer buys a 1TB drive, installs it, windows tells them they have ~930Mb, customer feels ripped off, writes a bad review or send it back...

the larger the drive, the more shocking that headline 8% discrepancy looks.

If kobo use the same measurements ( & I cant be bothered to check) , an empty 8GB Forma will actually be 7.3 GB, and that's before firmware etc takes its chunk

1TB or ~930 GiB is quite a bit larger than 930 Mb.

NAND flash-based storage (flash drives, SSDs, etc) follows the same conventions as normal drives wherein 1GB = 1 billion bytes.

In terms of raw NAND capacity, a 1TB SSD likely has 1TiB or more. Given the way NAND flash works though (no direct overwrite), the discrepancy between decimal and binary is used as the minimum level for spare area/over provisioning.

8GB is around 7.45GiB. Around 1GB for firmware/OS related partition(s) sounds about right.

[stumped]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

1TB or ~930 GiB is quite a bit larger than 930 Mb.

...

whoops.

but whatever, the various measurement methods assume way too much knowledge from non IT users
e.g. if I look at my 2TB drives, in windows, it says that each have only 1.81 TB, both the internal drive and the WD USB drive
It does not really matter who you blame for that state of affairs... microsoft? , WD ? the apparency is that i have been ripped off to the tune of 0.19 TB per drive. And my 1TB drive has only 931Gb

(I understand that I haven't lost anything, really - but lots of others don't . Just look at amazon reviews for any storage product

A naive customer buying an 8Gb Kobo reader will expect something close to 8Gb, not 6.7 ! They may even start a thread here saying I've lost 1.5Gb

[Quoth]

Actually a laptop OS can have magically missing space.
Almost OS use a whole number of "blocks" per file. You hope this is an exact multiple of what Flash/SSD or a HDD controller really writes.
Loads of small files (icons, text) will on average waste more space than video for that reason and also the overhead of the directory entries. I've seen that cause a 20% discrepancy between free space and the actual file sizes. Flash writes are FAR faster and Flash lives longer if writes use an exact multiple of the internal block mode access size.

We can't single out Kobo, because ALL gadgety stuff, tablets, laptops etc is sold quoting the headline hardware capacities. The actual free space depending not just on the OS size, but files sizes and filesystem overheads such as block size and directory overhead depending on the chosen partitioning and formatting.

Often a number of music tracks, photos or books is quoted which is less meaningful than quoting initial free space, which I don't remember seeing ever in over 40 years.
Music could be 128 k MP3 or 320 k MP3 or 24 bit uncompressed. Do we count Famous Five & Hardy boys books, Manga, Epic Fantasy or Tolstoy?

[Quoth]

customer buys a 1TB (replacement) drive, installs it, windows tells them they have ~930Mb, customer feels ripped off, writes a bad review or send it back...

Maybe on Windows 12? Actually on some systems the Win10 now "reserves" an extra 32 G for "system use" since an update.
Considering how many supermarket Win10 laptops and how many Win10 x86 tablets ONLY had 32G SSD or Flash from new ...

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by bookandtea

Reset my Forma to factory settings tonight. Installed 30 books. Happened to check settings/device and apparently only 6.4 GB out of 8 GB is available. Seems odd. These are all shortish novels, not 30 Lonely Planet guides.

Is there a way to troubleshoot what happened to my missing storage space?

Thanks!

On my Forma, I show the exposed storage partition at 6.73GB or 7,227,146,240 bytes. The remaining space is mostly used by the OS and recovery partitions which are Linux ext4 partitions that are not exposed over the USB interface.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by stumped

ok but bottom line is customer buys a 1TB drive, installs it, windows tells them they have ~930Mb, customer feels ripped off, writes a bad review or send it back...

the larger the drive, the more shocking that headline 8% discrepancy looks.

If kobo use the same measurements ( & I cant be bothered to check) , an empty 8GB Forma will actually be 7.3 GB, and that's before firmware etc takes its chunk

8%? That would give a 920GB drive for a drive that was exactly 1,000,000,000,000 bytes of raw storage. The discrepancy also gets worse as you use larger drive size increments. KB vs KiB is 2.3%, MB vs. MiB is 4.6%, GB vs GiB is 6.9%, TB vs Tib is 9.1%, etc.

For a Forma, 7.45GB of raw storage—assuming the empty disk was exactly 8,000,000,000 bytes—minus the hidden partitions and bits and bobs that don't fit into the partitioning scheme comes close to the 6.73GB I see as the drive size.