This week, there’s been a few articles circulating the Internet, about how much storage Samsung is using for “System” on the Galaxy S23 models. This all started with an article from Ars Technica this week, about how the Galaxy S23 was using 60GB of space for the System. This is true, and also not true at the same time.
Now I do feel partly responsible for this, as I replied to Mishaal Rahman’s tweet about how much space the system is using up. I replied with a screenshot of the storage on the Galaxy S23 Ultra, which at that point, I had only been using for two days. It showed that the System was using nearly 69GB of space. But that was before I gave the file manager access, so it could separate app storage from System. After that, it dropped to around 57GB. That’s still a lot of storage for “System”. But that’s not just the operating system.
So what’s the big deal here? Well, Samsung reports storage a bit differently from other smartphone makers. The System storage is comprised of the OS, the cache, and also the amount of storage that is not actually available. Let’s dive deeper.
What all is included in “System” storage?
First, the obvious part, the System storage does include the space that the operating system uses. And we do know that Samsung is not the most optimized software platform out there.
Next, it also includes the cache. So as you use your apps, and download more, this number is going to go up. Just as it has on my Galaxy S23 Ultra since I started using it a week ago. It’s gone from around 56.7GB up to around 57.2GB. Not a huge difference, but that is likely all cache.
Now for the third, and largest part of this storage. Samsung includes the advertised storage amount here. But that’s not actually the amount of storage you’re getting. Have you ever gotten a hard drive or disk drive, and it showed up as a capacity that’s lower than the advertised capacity? Like a 1TB drive will sometimes show up as having 931GB of space? That’s because of gigbytes vs gibibytes. When you convert to gibibytes, that 1TB of storage actually comes out to 931GB of space.
And that’s what Samsung is doing on the Galaxy S23 (and previous models too). Adding that storage to the “System”. This also explains why the System storage varies so wildly between the different storage variants of the S23 series.
While my 512GB Ultra showed 57GB, a 256GB Ultra was showing around 39GB being used by the System. And a 128GB Galaxy S23 has about 27GB used by the system. Those are some pretty big differences, but once we do the math, it makes sense.
So on my 512GB model, if we convert that to gibibytes, you’ll find that you actually only have 476GB. That’s a difference of 36GB. So subtract that from the 57GB, and you get about 21GB for the actual system. That sounds a lot better, and pretty close to what my Pixel 7 shows is being used for the system. Still some bloat in there with the Samsung apps, of course, but definitely not 57GB being used just for the system.
Other OEMs display this differently. Like OnePlus for instance, shows it as part of “other” which is separate from System. And Google doesn’t even show it in the Pixel. At least that I can tell, but then again this is a 128GB Pixel 7, so the amount of storage missing would be fairly small.
No, you’re Galaxy S23 is not using 60GB for the operating system
I hope that this quick explainer shows you that your Galaxy S23 is not using 60GB for the operating system. I know that would look especially bad on a 128GB Galaxy S23, but it’s actually only about 27GB used on that model. So you still have roughly 100GB to fill up with apps, photos, videos, etc.
I do hope that Samsung will change up the storage page a bit, to better decipher this. Add an “other” section with the amount of storage missing, and allow users to tap on it and give a brief explanation of what’s going on. That would do a world of wonders for clearing this whole thing up.
Samsung’s smartphones are definitely not the most optimized, but no, the system is not twice the size of a Windows 11 install, or 4x the size of the OS on a Pixel 7.