Samsung is changing how storage is shown in One UI 6

Earlier this year, when the Samsung Galaxy S23 series had just launched, there was some confusion around how Samsung showcased the available storage on the phones. It was wrongly presumed that One UI took up ~60GB of internal storage, which would leave base 128GB storage variants with just about half the internal storage. However, this presumption was debunked as a conversion loss error. Samsung is now changing how storage is shown on One UI 6 based on Android 14, with the system partitions now accurately reporting how much storage they take up.

As highlighted by Max Weinbach, the Manage Storage section in One UI 6 now has a more accurate representation of the various partitions and files that reside on your internal storage. We’ve attached a comparative screenshot of One UI 5.1 below for reference.

As you can see, One UI 5.1 shows the “System” partition on our phone as a whopping 39.4GB, while the same is more accurately represented in One UI 6 as a more believable 16.5GB. In return, the conversion error that was the cause of confusion earlier this year has been shifted to “Other files,” which we can see as a rather tiny 81.75MB on One UI 5.1 and a whopping 11.34GB on One UI 6.

Of course, there is room for improvement here. People who are on the last few gigs of their storage will still remain puzzled about what the “Other files” on One UI are and why they take up so much space on their storage. The reality is that that space simply does not exist at all.

Companies market phone storage in GB (gigabytes), which is measured in powers of 1,024, while phone storage is represented in GiB (gibibytes), which is measured in powers of 1,000.

Effectively, a phone marketed as “512GB” of storage actually has 512GiB of storage, which is 476GB in reality. Similarly, 256GB marketing is 256GiB in storage, which is about 238GB of real storage; 128GB marketing is 128GiB actually, which is about 119GB of usable storage.

The difference between these figures is what the “System” partition on One UI 5.1 and the “Other files” partition on One UI 6 is hiding.

However, the figures don’t completely match what they should be. “Other files” on One UI 6 on a 512GB phone should be around 36GB (512GB minus 476GB), but only shows a fraction of it. It is possible that the phone is showing it as a ratio of storage used, in which case the “Other files” size will keep increasing as you store more and more files on your phone. When your phone storage is completely full, the “Other files” size should be closer to 36GB, thus hiding the marketing-storage disparity.

One UI 6 will be released soon in the stable branch while it is out for beta testers. We hope to get more clarity once the official changelog arrives for the stable update.