It’s worse this time. Microsoft was roundly pilloried for low functional storage rates in the Surface RT tablet. It appears that the big sibling to that device, the Surface Pro, suffers from similar woes.
The 32 gigabyte Surface RT had 16 gigabytes of free space. The 64 gigabyte Surface RT had 46. In short, for the lower-end Surface RT tablet, only half of the reported storage was up for user files. But like we said, it gets worse.
For the Surface Pro 64 gigabyte device, a shockingly low 23 gigabytes are open, The Verge has confirmed with Microsoft. That is it. At the moment, TNW cannot confirm figures for the Surface Pro 128 gigabyte model. However, the figure for the 64 gigabyte device means that a mere 36% of the listed storage is open for general file storage.
If there was ever an argument for SkyDrive, this is it. SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud-storage tool provides all users with 7 free gigabytes of space. Fractionally, that extends the 64 gigabyte Surface pro by almost one-third. I’m not sure if I should be heartened by that, or dispirited.
Whatever the case, Windows RT takes up a fat chunk of your space if you buy a Surface RT device, and an even more impressively lush portion of goes away with Windows 8 proper and the Pro.
For fun, here’s the chart that Microsoft released for the Surface RT:
Expect something similar to come out for the Surface Pro when it launches on February 9th.
Top Image Credit: BUILDWindows
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