[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jajarem64:
Good evening fellow XDA community members,

Interestingly enough, I have found myself with a Nexus 4 (16GB) that a friend of mine decided to toss my way due to an issue in which the device is no longer showing as 16GB, but rather an 8GB model within the bootloader. Now, as I have resolved this issue in the past with previous devices that have been brought to me, including my own personal devices as well, I immediately downloaded the latest, official, stock firmware for this device: MAKO 5.1.1 (LMY48T) c43c7cfd7e77ae97dad0c2e0f3810f84bc5e2ca3b4dc74256eb7e13012ec1131; thus, I further proceeded to unlock the bootloader, then fastboot flash the images via:

fastboot erase boot
fastboot erase cache
fastboot erase recovery
fastboot erase system
fastboot erase userdata
fastboot flash bootloader bootloader-mako-makoz30f.img
fastboot reboot-bootloader

fastboot flash radio radio-mako-m9615a-cefwmazm-2.0.1701.07.img
fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
fastboot flash boot boot.img
fastboot flash system system.img
fastboot flash cache cache.img
fastboot flash userdata userdata.img

Although I am aware that there is a simpler way to resolve the typical cache issue, via wiping cache in stock recovery, then proceeding to factory reset, I much rather prefer to properly vet this device for my usage, and it's presence--I follow a strict regimen of security protocols when introducing any device to my usage, and/or network.

Anyways, my overkill method failed, along with a -w update test, prompting my privy to attempt the aforementioned method as to bring resolution to this issue; however, being that I was left with roughly 5.5 GB of space after both attempts, I realized this was a much broader issue that would likely rest within the partitioning scheme of the device. As one would assume, I slammed my keys away at an adb shell, issuing the adb shell df command; thus revealing, to my lack of surprise, the following absurd partitioning scheme:

Filesystem Size Used Free Blksize
/dev 917.9M 32.0K 917.8M 4096
/sys/fs/cgroup 917.9M 12.0K 917.9M 4096
/mnt/asec 917.9M 0.0K 917.9M 4096
/mnt/obb 917.9M 0.0K 917.9M 4096
/system 827.8M 815.0M 12.8M 4096
/cache 551.7M 9.9M 541.9M 4096
/data 5.7G 735.9M 4.9G 4096
/persist 15.8M 4.2M 11.6M 4096
/firmware 64.0M 44.4M 19.5M 16384
/mnt/shell/emulated 5.7G 735.9M 4.9G 4096

Now, I've got many, many years of experience with pretty much everything, and in all of my years of experience, I have never seen, or allocated as much memory to any of the various oversized partitions, as depicted above, on any flavor--I am absolutely appalled by this blatant misappropriation of resources.

So, my question is, what should I do? I could resize, but will this present an issue in the future? I just couldn't imagine these resources being wasted for no good reason, but this could be the result of a failed attempt to resolve the issue by someone else. The device has never been reflashed or rooted in the past--the most anyone has done, to my knowledge, was a factory reset of the device.

Thank you,

J

EDIT: Let me be clear--I am referring to the resources allocated to /dev /cgroup /asec /obb. Perhaps I am wrong about the device having been a 16GB model. Regardless, there exists resource waste with the current configurations.