Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Nexus 7 16GB and Lousy-Slow Memory


So I pre-ordered the largest Nexus 7 money could buy at the time, a 16GB SD card-free tablet with Android 4.1. I've spent the past couple months tweaking my tablet, putting music on it, watching movies. Unfortunately, somewhere in the hustle and bustle I loaded on too much data. Yeah, a 16 GB Nexus 7 actually only has 13.14GB of available storage for the user. And if you use too much of that memory, you have permanently decreased your write-performance for the tablet.

It may be hard to see from the right, but even after dropping down to 5.23GB free, my sequential and random writes are horrendous. I downloaded AndroBench, a free app for measuring storage performance on Google Play, and kicked off the suite. A nice ability about this benchmarking app is being able to compare yourself with other top phones/tablets.


Sequential Write
Random Write - Doesn't even show a blip!
Above you can see that my random and sequential writes are barely visible on the charts. Compare these results with a new Nexus 7, #2 on the charts for writes.


Sequential Read
Random Read

Reads are not so glaringly slow compared to the competition. Anyway, I will be trying a factory reset to see if this resolves the issue with writes and reads. If not, Google's support said I could RMA the tablet. I'll just be safer with my data usage next time (I paid $50 extra for that data that I'm not allowed to use...)

*****UPDATE****
Great news about Android 4.3 is that it supports TRIM! See Anand's post on Android 4.3 for details. Too bad I sold my Nexus 7 a couple months ago :-/

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