Microsoft's 128GB Surface Pro will ship with just 83GB of usable space

Microsoft has revealed that the 128GB Surface Pro will ship with just 83GB of usable storage space. No word yet on how much space the 64GB version will arrive with but if the same 45GB is unavailable from the get-go,...

Read more

Well from the side view it kinda looks like it might have a spare memory slot. I would guess windows expects its customers to add extra memory.

Damn, 45 gigs... what do you supposed could be in there?

Big deal... anytime a tablet has a MicroSD slot AND a USB you should buy the smallest internal size they have. They'll charge you twice as much to have the usable space internal, while external storage is much cheaper. I know internal storage is more convenient and you can't install apps to an SD Card, but even 45GB for apps is plenty.

I don't really see this as a big deal any more. I have a 120 GB SSD on my computer with Windows 8 Pro installed and I don't know exactly how much the Windows installation takes up but the only thing I have on the SSD is my music collection (~6 GB) and pictures, and applications. Any video files or otherwise large files get stored on a external 2 TB drive. I also have a large portion of my documents in SkyDrive (and locally stored).

I would only see this as an issue if you were to download a lot of videos to the Surface, but I think most people prefer to stream their movies, or they have high-quality enough rips that they have a dedicated hard drive for them anyway.

It's hard to say if this is really a big deal. It depends on who MS expects to be interested in this kind of tablet. The power of Surface Pro vs RT is of course that it can run standard desktops applications (and presumably pretty well, considering the specs). Limited disk space is an issue if the target user will have many applications to install.

Funny how the initial remarks here are the opposite to the vilification you can see on neowin. Personally I am interested in the 128gb version, and even then I'd probably be tossing in at least a 32gb micro sd card to compliment the on board storage anyways so I look at all the backlash on neowin and scratch my head.

A single uncompressed blu-ray rip, for example or, tickle your fancy, don't say no to nothing

You are missing the point of owning a tablet... If I want to drag around with me multiple hardrives I'll just buy a laptop with bigger hardrive.

I'll tell you what I'd be interested in. I'd like to have a notebook with a detachable touchscreen monitor. A monitor that interfaces through wireless with the PC that could be plugged in, to allow for longer processing while you are portable with the touchscreen monitor.

At that price I'd rather go with a nice laptop.

You're not allowed to look at this article. It's the OEMs that are hurting Windows 8 sales and nothing else.

I have a 180GB Agility 2 SSD with only a few games + the OS (Windows 7 64bit) ; and its barely enough. You don't want to use more then 70% of your SSD's storage for max life/performance.

True, and while I think 45GB being eaten up fresh out of the box is pretty crappy, you can install and leave a micro-sd card installed for media. I grabbed a 64GB card for my 32GB Surface RT.

You people just don't get it, do you? Whether they call this "Pro" or not is moot. It's still a computer toy, that you might just be able to do a sales presentation or something similar with when you're traveling. You still need desktops and a server in your office, and don't throw your laptop with the 750GB hard drive away just yet.

If you want to rip and store Blu-Ray files, then buy an NAS SATA RAID enclosure, and fill it with 4TB mechanical drives

My little Windows 8 Pro that I setup to test on a Desktop is just 10 Gigs on disk. (No Office, no Media Center.) If there were recovery partitions, and the OS, that still wouldn't add up to 45 Gigs. That's a pretty big chunk of storage taken away from the user.

I wonder what they're putting on there in all that space?!

The restore partition, is going to eat as much space as the OS installation. Since this doesn't have an optical drive, maybe they image the OS and apps on the restore partition. I wouldn't be surprised if they have some SSD flash tasked as RAM extension. Although, that is just a wild guess.

Surface Pro comes with a restore partition and Office preinstalled.

128GB is unformatted. That's 119GB formatted. Up to 20GB for the OS and bundles apps, makes 99GB. 10GB for recovery partition makes 89GB. Some rough figures, but there you go.

You could always delete the recovery partition and regain 10-15GB.

It doesn't come with office.

Is this all about the clown with the lawsuit? Does every company have to divulge the free space on their machines when they sell them, or just M$? Because that sure sounds like unfair bias, and anti competitive business practices if they don't.

Yeah, as long as you're able to image the recovery partition to a bootable USB you can. Otherwise that would be kind of stupid.