How To
Get Extra Storage Space on Samsung Galaxy Devices – Fix Low Disk Problem
Q. I have a Samsung Galaxy S5 which I have been using from the last few months & now the get “Low Disk Space” errors whenever I try to capture a photo or a video. I do not want to transfer the data to my computer & wish to quickly have some storage space on the phone. Is there any magical way to add some storage on the Phone, since I’m traveling & need a fix to this problem. ~Rajesh
A. Samsung has been innovating on their hardware front year on year with the Galaxy S series where they launched the Galaxy S6 Smartphone this year followed by the Galaxy S6 Edge. Few months later they had launched the plus-sized device ie the Galaxy S6 Edge + & now the Galaxy Note 5 few of which come with just 16 GB of storage option.
On the software front, all of these devices come with the TouchWiz UI which is Samsung’s skin over Android which many of their users hate. This is not easily removable unless you root & install a custom ROM on your device which is something not everyone can do. Hence in this quick tutorial we are going to show you how you could fix the “Low Disk Space” Error which you generally get when all the storage is full with your media files & applications installed.
To get started, you need to head over to the Storage option on your phone under the Settings where it is divided into multiple sections. Here you would find the Cache option near the bottom which is what you need to clear, but before you do that you need to understand what is this cache data.
If you visit a website the first time all the elements of that specific web page are stored on your phone’s cache. The same way if you fire up an application for the first time you would notice it loads up slowly but if you reopen it, its faster. If you also access your photo gallery, the albums show you thumbnails all of which take up some storage space on your device. Most of the times you don’t need to revisit those web pages or won’t need that data which takes up space on the phone, called as cache.
In this example if you notice there is around 19.87GB of total storage available on the phone while around 499MB is taken up by the cache.
You need to tap on “Cached Data” option, following which you would see a pop-up which you need to tap to confirm & complete this task.
Again this is a new phone, hence the folder is not filled up but if you are using the same phone from a long time it would get eventually filled up. On an average you could end up saving 1GB – 2GB of total storage with this tutorial & if you are worried about deleting all the cache, Android does offer you the option of deleting the cache based on the application level.
Let us know how much storage space you have saved using this tutorial & comment below if you have any other queries.