Cheap Android 10 Tablet With 129GB System?

Pharian

Junior Member
Jul 12, 2020
2
0
Hi all,

Apologies to create an account and just immediately jump in with a big fat question, however I am somewhat concerned about a tablet I just bought.

Essentially I bought a cheap tablet to use solely as a music player. The plan is to mount it on the wall and fill it with my MP3 collection (about 300gb).

I was going to get a Samsung Galaxy and 512GB memory card but then found these mega cheap "10.1 Inch Android 10.0 Bluetooth Tablet PC 10+512GB WiFi 1080P Dual Camera GPS" on ebay for about AU$100. That's like $400 cheaper than the Galaxy and memory card here in Oz, and considering I just need it to play MP3 files it seemed like a good deal.

It just arrived and it has a staggering 129GB apparently reserved for system. The 512GB internal storage says there is 383GB free. But here are only 309MB of apps. I did a full erase/restore and it's the same. I plugged it into the PC and it says the same for the P10 drive that appeared in my Windows 10 drive list, 383GB free of 512GB.

I can't see the 129GB anywhere. It's clearly hidden in the root of the memory somewhere, or something along those lines. 129GB seems outrageously big for an Android install. I'm leery of it being filled with malware or something sketchy that will try to infect my PC or other devices.

Any ideas wtf is going on with this thing? Any help would be appreciated.

Even if there is malware it might be OK because I'm not going to use it for anything apart from playing music. I might not even need to ever connect it to my WIFI network. Though I'm considering turning every other device off first before connecting it to the network if I do have to download something.

Am I being overly paranoid here?

Here's the link to the ebay ad where it came from:

10.1 Inch Android 10.0 Bluetooth Tablet PC 10+512GB WiFi 1080P Dual Camera GPS | eBay
 

Traveller

Administrator
Staff member
Jun 16, 2012
2,858
982
The 129GB is very large, but when you actually delve into the partition structure you will find the 129GB broken down into multiple partitions. To find out more about the internal partitions, look here and follow the commands in the accepted answer. Be sure to have Google's Android Debug Bridge copied to a folder on C, because you'll need it to run the commands.

When manufacturers release devices they uniformly all give the total amount of storage on the device. What they don't tell you is that a portion - in this case one-fourth of the total - is set aside for the system, data, and other items such as the connectivity firmware and the recovery partition. The space reserved is, for all intents and purposes, unavailable to you and will never show in a computer the tablet is connected to.

Using a third-party file manager such as Total Commander or Astro, it is possible to view the files in the /system and /data partitions. There are malware scanners that should be able to scan the device in its entirety and see if there are any dodgy files. If you do find any, then you can return the tablet to the seller.

The tablet in question is sold as a gaming tablet. Now the 129GB becomes clear. With some games being 1GB or more in size when fully downloaded the manufacturer wanted to be certain there was enough room in /data to be able to store these games. I'm sure running the commands in the link I provided will confirm this.

I don't think you're paranoid: only cautious.
 

Pharian

Junior Member
Jul 12, 2020
2
0
Thanks for the suggestions, much appreciated.

I plugged the damn thing in and it blew up my mainboard which is now in a constant boot loop with what appears to be a blown bios. Yay fun times, lol. Serves me right for trying to go the cheap route. Grr
 
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