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| Windows RT+Office RT takes up 12GB disk space |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-10-19 20:07:59 |
| Interesting little tidbit from the Reddit AMA session with Microsoft's Surface team. One Redditor wondered just how much disk space Windows RT takes up - in other words, if you buy the 32GB Surface RT tablet, how much space is left for your stuff? It turns out that while Windows 8 RT is considerably smaller than its Windows 7 x86 predecessor, it's still huge by mobile standards. |
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| RE[2]: Not quite true |
| By marcp on 2012-10-19 23:03:10 |
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> I wonder what it actually is there that's taking so horribly much storage space It's probobly their "shared libraries" folder [It's called WinSxS in Windows 7, IIRC], or some RT counterpart of it. These guys surely don't know how to write the code that is both compact and portable. |
 - Score: 3 |
| RE[3]: Not quite true |
| By tanzam75 on 2012-10-20 00:23:18 |
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> It's probobly their "shared libraries" folder [It's called WinSxS in Windows 7, IIRC], or some RT counterpart of it. The WinSxS folder does not take up any additional space. It's almost all hardlinks. |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE[2]: Good reasons or bad excuses? |
| By kaiwai on 2012-10-20 00:38:42 |
|
> Uh, in comparison to Linux, Windows is terrible about generic drivers. Remember, every single USB optical mouse or keyboard with any sort of reprogramability has its own driver. A lot of these from the same manufacturer use the same software, sure, but that is still a lot of drivers. Windows 7 might have better handling of USB drives and wireless network cards, but quite a few categories of devices will cause Win 7 to automatically install the manufacturer's needlessly proprietary driver. Oh, and let us not forget all those programs that install kernel drivers. Now, most of those drivers are not included on the default install, but I wouldn't be surprised if some windows machines had 5-10GB of drivers. Because although some vendors support particular standards they also develop their hardware so that they go beyond just those standards. For example I have a Logitech C920 webcam which is UVC compliant but to access all the features you need to have the Logitech driver install. Another example of that would be printers where a printer might support the 'XML Paper Specification' but require additional drivers to then the end user can be notified as to the level of ink remaining or provide diagnostic information when things go wrong. Then there are those vendors who quite frankly 'don't give a damn' and simply ignore the standards or implement them in a broken way thus making the built in generic ones complete pointless (Linux/*BSD btw suffers from the same problem, even when the driver conforms to 100% of the specification the driver developers then have to spend time programming around dumb decisions made by the hardware engineers at said widget company). As for the installation size, it will be interesting to see where it being used but with that being said the comparison (by some) between the iPad and Surface is silly given that the Surface allows expansion where as with the iPad when you run out of storage you're 'shit out of luck'. I'd sooner give up some 'thinness' for the sake of having expandability thus enable the 'life' of the product to go beyond simply a refresh cycle or two. |
| - Score: 4 |
| On a different note... |
| By galvanash on 2012-10-20 01:02:00 |
|
This seems to me to be a good example of Microsoft's lack of shrewd marketing when compared to Apple... If this were an Apple product the base model would be marketed as having 16GB of storage, the high end model would have 48GB (or maybe 20GB and 50GB, but consumers seem to really like base-16 integers for some reason I still don't fathom)... It creates a larger perceived advantage for the higher end model (i.e. 3x the storage), and gives them the advantage of being able to say that ALL of the reported storage is accessible to users. More importantly, it makes the fact that the OS image uses 12GB of space (which is fricken' huge) mostly irrelevant (since your not really paying for it). As it is now, proclaiming the thing has 32GB of storage looks like a lie buried in the truth. This might become a scandal, and its ashamed because it has nothing to do with the product, its purely an issue with the messaging. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: Not quite true |
| By tanzam75 on 2012-10-20 01:22:42 |
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And it's not even 12 GB. It's actually 9.8 GiB. I can't believe nobody has pointed this out yet. What Microsoft actually said on that Reddit thread was that "After the OS, OfficeRT and a bunch of apps, you will still have more that 20GB." Thus, they did not say that disk usage was 12 GB. They said that free space was 20 GB. Ah, but how did he get that free space figure? Probably in Windows Explorer -- which reports free disk space in binary gibibytes, even though it uses the "GB" abbreviation. Yet flash memory is sold using decimal gigabytes. My "128 GB" SSD is reported as "119 GB [= GiB]" in Windows Explorer. A 32 GB flash drive = 29.8 GiB. If you have "more than 20 [GiB]" of free space remaining, then that means the entire running system takes up 9.8 GiB of space, not 12. Now let us dissect the 9.8 GiB still further. What do you get on Windows RT that you don't get on iOS? - Office RT. My x86 Office 2013 is 2 GiB, but Office RT includes fewer applications. Assume Office RT takes up 1.0 GiB. - Drivers. My x64 Windows 8 install has 0.8 MiB of drivers, but Windows RT has a reduced driver set. Call it 0.5 GiB. - Fonts, many of them bundled with Office. My install has 0.3 MiB of fonts. Fonts don't shrink when ported to ARM. If you accept that these are worth the 1.8 GiB they take up, then we're now down to 8 GiB that can really be attributed to Windows RT and "a bunch of apps." That includes the pagefile (about 1 GiB on a system with 2 GiB RAM), IMEs for a whole boatload of languages (the dictionaries for simplified Chinese alone are about 60 MB), etc. Edited 2012-10-20 01:25 UTC |
| - Score: 7 |
| RE: Windows is notorious for this |
| By tanzam75 on 2012-10-20 01:29:43 |
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> It is also known to grows in size over time. This can be because of installation files being left over even if the application is uninstalled. Interesting. Under what circumstances are installers left over after applications are uninstalled? I've noticed that a lot of installers extract to a temporary directory, and then forget to delete it when the MSI finishes running. But this has nothing to do with uninstall -- they eat up the disk space even if you never uninstall the app. The \Windows\Installer directory should clean up after itself. It's those pesky temporary directories that bootstrappers extract into that tend to hang around. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Not quite true |
| By Laurence on 2012-10-20 01:37:30 |
|
> And it's not even 12 GB. It's actually 9.8 GiB. I can't believe nobody has pointed this out yet. What Microsoft actually said on that Reddit thread was that "After the OS, OfficeRT and a bunch of apps, you will still have more that 20GB." Thus, they did not say that disk usage was 12 GB. They said that free space was 20 GB. Ah, but how did he get that free space figure? Probably in Windows Explorer -- which reports free disk space in binary gibibytes, even though it uses the "GB" abbreviation. Yet flash memory is sold using decimal gigabytes. My "128 GB" SSD is reported as "119 GB [= GiB]" in Windows Explorer. A 32 GB flash drive = 29.8 GiB. If you have "more than 20 [GiB]" of free space remaining, then that means the entire running system takes up 9.8 GiB of space, not 12. AFAIK SSDs do actually report the space correctly. What actually happens is not the entire SSD volume is available to fill; some is always reserved for load wearing (thus extending the lifetime of the unit). The reason being that SSDs use a CoW method (copy-on-write) and if you had a full SSD, then there's less free block to write each fs update too. Thus you're forced to recycle the same blocks (which is very bad for the lifetime of solid state drives). However as modern SSDs keep a little bit of space back, it means there's a greater pool of free blocks to balance the writing across. So a 120GB SSD does actually have 120GB of storage but you're only allowed to fill ~120GB as the remainer is there purely for load wearing. I hope that makes sense, i should have been in bed 2 hours ago so it's probably not the clearest post I've made lol |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Comment by marcp |
| By galvanash on 2012-10-20 01:40:35 |
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Um.. Where do they even call it an embedded system? Mircosoft is trying to use the exact same platform for both portal computing devices and traditional notebooks and desktops... Of course it isn't an embedded system. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Good Points |
| By kaiwai on 2012-10-20 01:42:26 |
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Regarding native desktop ARM applications - good question. Even if their argument is "well, Surface is only a tablet" there is also the possibility of traditional laptops appearing with ARM CPU's, there might even be more adventurous hardware vendors willing to sell ARM based desktops such as an ultra-thin 'all in one' computer thus would necessitate the ability to run traditional desktop applications be they ported from x86 win32 to ARM win32. The dream I do have is that maybe Windows 8 with WinRT is the first step in WinRT being a framework for both traditional desktop applications and metro ones. I'd love that to be the case and Windows 8 merely being pushed out there as something for the 'tablets' with Windows 9 being an upgrade that targets both platforms but I have been disappointed in the past hence I keep my optimism very sober. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: Not quite true |
| By tanzam75 on 2012-10-20 02:02:04 |
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> So a 120GB SSD does actually have 120GB of storage but you're only allowed to fill ~120GB as the remainer is there purely for load wearing. That the 7% overprovisioning factor happens to be the same as the difference between GiB and GB is a nice coincidence. But it's just that -- a coincidence. The coincidence disappears when you look at drives that have RAISE. See, e.g., the 960 GB OWC Mercury Electra MAX 3G SSD: http://www.anandtech.com/show/60... It has 1024 GiB of raw capacity, and 894 GiB of formatted capacity. The difference is not 7% but 14% -- and it's because some of the raw capacity is reserved for RAISE as well as overprovisioning. They're advertising this as a 960 GB drive (= 894 GiB), not as a 1024 GB or a 1 TB drive. In other words, they're not advertising the raw capacity in binary prefixes, but the formatted capacity in decimal SI prefixes. Magnetic hard drives also had a higher raw capacity than formatted, as did floppy disks. Because the difference wasn't anywhere close to the 5% difference between MiB/MB or the 2.4% difference between KiB/KB, the urban legend did not have a chance to spawn as it did with SSDs. (Trick question: Why are 1.44 MB floppies called that? They're neither 1.44 decimal MB, nor 1.44 binary MiB, nor 1440 decimal KB, nor 1440 binary KiB.) Edited 2012-10-20 02:15 UTC |
| - Score: 3 |
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