Samsung's new ATIV 500T Windows 8 hybrid has some impressive features, including Intel's Clover Trail Atom SoC, but storage capacity may be a major drawback.
The ATIV Smart PC's Box lists the device with 64GB of available storage, but things are not quite as simple.
As ExtremeTech points out, after all bloatware and other such factors are taken into account, the remaining storage capacity is less than half of what is stated. Windows 8's Storage Manager shows the storage capacity as 64GB of total space with two Recovery Partitions, a Windows Recovery Environment (RE) partition, and an EFI partition. Device Manager, meanwhile, shows that the device's internal storage, consisting of an MMC memory card, only holds a total of 59GB, with 52GB actually available for applications.
One thing that both the Windows 8 Storage Manager and the Device Manager agree on is that the actual amount of available storage is roughly 51GB. Here's why this could be a major issue:
The fully patched version of Windows 8 weighs 12.6GB. Another 4.14GB are destined for the swapfile, pagefile, and hibernation file. Samsung installs more software, including Norton Antivirus, taking up another 2.4GB. Moving on, a basic English install of Adobe Acrobat Reader takes another 113MB, but Samsung actually installs every language pack available, thus expanding the installation to up to 491MB.
While some of the software, such as the Cyberlink PowerDVD, is not exactly worthless, it doesn't seem worth installing either, especially with such a limited amount of storage available. The ATIV 500T tablet/laptop hybrid doesn't even have a DVD drive, and external DVD drives typically require two USB 2.0 connections - the 500T has only one. This means that users will likely not be playing any DVDs on the device.
Another factor worth taking into account is that the 500T doesn't ship with Office pre-loaded. For billions of people, Office is a necessary install. Without it, the 500T has roughly 32GB of storage available out of the box. Just 32GB of usable space on a device marketed as offering 64GB may be an issue for many. Is this false advertising, or just a little omission that goes under the radar?
