A handful of you are already planning on picking up the Surface Pro when it comes out February 9 (use that reservation card ). Before you make the decision on whether to get the 64GB or 128GB version you should know about some storage issues. Like the original Surface RT, useable storage on the Surface Pro will be less than advertised. If you pick up the 128GB model you’re looking at 83GB left and if you pick up the 64GB version you’ll be stuck with 23Gb. Let that sink in.

We first brought the issue up in a From the Forums column, well technically you brought it up first, but it’s worth highlighting again since its making rounds around the blogosphere. Microsoft has released the following statement to a variety of outlets:

“The 128 GB version of Surface Pro has 83 GB of free storage out of the box. The 64GB version of Surface Pro has 23GB of free storage out of the box. Of course, Surface Pro has a USB 3.0 port for connectivity with almost limitless storage options, including external hard drives and USB flash drives. Surface also comes pre-loaded with SkyDrive, allowing you to store up to 7GB of content in the cloud for free. The device also includes a microSDXC card slot that lets you store up to 64GB of additional content to your device. Customers can also free up additional storage space by creating a backup bootable USB and deleting the recovery partition.”

While it’s definitely an advantage that you can add more storage with a microSD card, it’s still rather unfortunate so much space is used up by the OS, built-in apps, and the recovery partition. If you’re reading a tech site like ours, odds are you can easily remove the recovery partition by creating a backup bootable USB, but the average user out there won’t even know what’s wrong.

Knowing what you now know, which version of the Surface Pro are you going to go with? Can and should Microsoft communicate the situation and potential solutions to customers in a clear manner? Are they hoping to push SkyDrive? Sound off below or in this Windows Phone Central Forums discussion.

Source: Engadget