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I have a Lava Iris X1 (8GB ROM), but the storage shows up in two types.

Internal storage total space is 3.54GB:

Available                         : 2.52GB
Apps (app data & media etc.)      : 0.97GB
Cached data                       : 48.17MB

Phone storage total space is 2.50GB:

Available                         : 8.55MB
Apps (app data & media etc.)      : 27.54MB
Pictures, videos                  : 1.85GB
audio (music, ringtones etc.)     : 313MB
Downloads                         : 25.92MB
Cached data                       : 64.14MB
Misc.                             : 223MB

I am confused about why my phone memory is less than 8 GB. Is my phone's total ROM capacity 8GB or not?

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The flash chip inside your phone is 8gb, but not all of that space will be available to the user - some of it will be used by the other partitions, such as /system/ where the Android OS is installed, and the /cache/ partition which is used for temporary storage, among other things.

You can install this app to see how your storage is partitioned: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cls.partition

For example, my Xperia SP also has 8gb storage

According to that app:

  • /lta-label - 16mb
  • /system - 1211mb
  • /cache - 542mb
  • /data - 5500mb

The /data partition is the one you'll see as internal storage.

Note that this doesn't actually add up to 8gb (more like 7gb) - the other point to remember is that device manufacturers always lie about capacities - e.g. my 16gb microSD card is actually 14.8gb. (It'll usually be a gig or so below what's reported, possibly much more for bigger devices.)

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    I think a lot of SD card makers use 1000 to mean Mega, rather than 1024, so you get 1000 Kb in a Mb, 1,000 Mb in a Gb etc, so each time the actual size is decreasing. 1,000 x 1,000 x 1,000 = 1000000000. 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1073741824 And that's not factoring in Kb etc below these values!
    – RossC
    Commented Sep 25, 2014 at 14:00
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    Agreeing to Ross' comment, one more thing to consider concerning your SD card: storage media usually have "reserved areas" to e.g. be able to prevent data loss in case of block errors, usually 5..10% of the available space, and the file system has such as well (see e.g. here, first paragraph and the layout table). Hence the usable space of a 16 GB card is something around 15 GB – and the manufacturer did not "lie".
    – Izzy
    Commented Sep 25, 2014 at 15:20

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