A spokesperson for Microsoft confirmed today that the 64GB flavor of the Microsoft Surface Pro, which goes on sale February 9th, will have a dramatically low amount of storage that buyers can actually utilize. Only 23GB of the 64GB is available to users to store their own content. That’s less than half of the total storage available for users’ needs.
What happens to the rest of the gigabytes? Well, the Surface will use approximately 41GB of space for its own needs — a hell of a lot, as you could imagine. These “needs” include the Windows 8 Pro operating system itself as well as all the apps and services that come preloaded, plus a recovery partition to protect against total data loss.
Microsoft is also selling a 128GB model, which has 83GB available to the owner and locks away 45GB for system use.
The news may come as a bit of a disappointment to potential buyers of Microsoft’s Surface Pro, though it may not be much of a surprise. The 32GB Surface RT only lets users access 16GB of it. 23GB isn’t a whole lot of storage to work with on the 64GB model, especially if you buy one with 55GB or so of content ready to load up on it only to find out that roughly half of that won’t fit. Luckily, the Surface Pro includes USB 3.0 and microSDXC ports so you can expand storage as needed.
I’m sure someone somewhere will attack me for this but I can’t resist making this comparison: the iPad’s 32GB model gives users more storage than the 64GB Surface Pro. Just something to think about.