Now, those who use custom recoveries often know that a factory reset tends to keep a good deal of data in /data/media/. However, I would like to ensure that this location gets wiped so that all of my storage (besides the actual Android system of course) becomes available again. Is there a way to do this?
I'm using TWRP 2.8.7.0 on a Samsung Tab 2 running Android 5.1.1, if that helps.
/data/media is actually your so-called "internal SD card" space. It's not wiped by default because, as the name implies, it's intended for media storage like photos and music. It usually should not contain any personal account information or important app data (that isn't encrypted). Many custom recoveries do have an option to wipe the internal SD card, you just need to select it when doing your factory reset.
TWRP actually has a detailed post about this at https://twrp.me/faq/datamedia.html. The most relevant excerpt:
In TWRP we also have a wipe internal storage option that rm -rf's the media folder and a "Format Data" option that formats to recreate the entire file system in case something goes completely wrong or to remove device encryption.
If you just want to free up the space, you could also simply use a file browser to deleted everything on your internal SD card.
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