Storage Low message, but 470MB still free?

[Batman]

Strange event occurred a few times in the past couple of days: the annoying "storage low" message and accompanying "disk & exclamation mark" icon in the notification bar). The "strange" part is that I noticed it happens as soon as storage gets to 470MB. Is that a new threshold for ICS/JB? With my old phone running 2.x the warning was triggered around 18MB.

Now I understand the ICS/JB have a larger footprint compared to Froyo, Gingerbread and previous versions, but 470MB and storage is considered low?????!!!!!!! And I thought Windows was bloated

Any word of wisdom from those of you more versed in these matters?

[GoCliffGo05]

Dang you only have ~470 MB left?

It seems like a lot but its really not. Some videos, songs or even apps with large data COULD eat that up really quickly.

[ToeJamm]

If my math is correct that is approximately 3% of 16Gb. The developers probably have the trigger set for some number they've determined to be an appropriate level. As Gocliff says, that is not a lot of memory with today's file size.

[xXAaron04Xx]

It will trigger a notification if you are under 1g of memory. Try getting rid of some files you don't need or store videos on a laptop then delete them off your phone

[Batman]

My apps total is less than 1GB. The main issue is a GPS app with offline maps. They take about 2GB and thanks to the brilliant idea Google had to make ICS/JB mounting the internal storage as if it were a SD card, the app is fooled into ignoring the actual 16GB uSD card I have and it installs the maps on the internal memory...

Other than the apps and their data (again saved on Internal even when some of it could go on the SD) I have nothing else on Internal storage. All of my music, video, ebooks, etc. are on the uSD. Even the camera app is set to save on the uSD.

I am looking into manually moving the map files and editing a cfg file of the app which lists the paths for all the files the GPS apps uses.

Not difficult, but very tedious work, as the file structure branches out in many directories, subdirectories and sub-sub-directories.

Plus I suspect the Dalvik cache has grown quite large. Not long ago I had almost 1GB free and I have not installed many apps since.

Not being rooted I can't wipe it clean. On my old phone, which I rooted, wiping the Dalvik cache the first time reclaimed quite a bit of storage.

Considering that the M has about 4.5GB available to the user (out of 8GB total), 470MB is a significant chunk. After my posting I found a thread on another forum mentioning that ICS/JB is set up to trigger the storage low warning once it gets down to 10% of the total available. One of the poster was getting the warning at 800MB...

If this is the case, not much I can do about it, other than remove rarely used apps or maybe even resort to a FDR. I have received three OTA since I have the phone and never done a FDR. Phone works perfectly well, but a FDR would probably do a good scrub of the internal storage.

Something I did was to clear the data of the MotoCare app, which had grown to 75MB. It was the single biggest "offender" of all my apps in size (next is Voice Command at 49MB). With that and a bit more cleanup here and there of data and cache in other apps I increased free storage to ~570MB.

Still, it annoys me to no end not having a definitive explanation of why 470MB is considered low storage.

I guess that is one of the drawbacks of a career in engineering. Everything has to have an explanation

Sorry for the long rant, hope that sharing what I found out may help others.

[hillmom]

Yes, a raging pain in the rear, but really your only option.

[someolddude]

I think unless your gonna root you really shouldn't complain. Your stuck in a Verizon rut. Root and a ton of options open up and you will find that 16gig too small quickly .