What's happened to my SD card?

A

AC Question

My Moto G 2nd generation updated to Android 6.0, and I left my SD card as "portable".

I found that I had lost the option to transfer apps to the card, but not being ultra-tech-savvy, I assumed that, with the upgrade, this was because they were being installed there automatically.

However, when I tried to install a new app yesterday, there was not enough space on internal storage.

I then discovered that to use the SD card for apps, I would have to format it for internal storage.

I did this, and the Settings storage info showed plenty of space.

However, when I tried to transfer apps (or data) to it, I was told consistently that there was not enough space.

I tried restarting the phone, unmounting and mounting the card, and finally, removing both the SD card and battery, then replacing them.

Same result.

I decided to leave it overnight and try again.

Now the Settings tell me that the SD card is "not inserted".

I have tried removing and replacing it several times, with no success.
 

B. Diddy

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Welcome to Android Central! My understanding is that once you've formatted the SD card as adoptable or internal storage, it becomes incorporated into the system's internal storage, so that you don't have to manually move apps to SD--the system will decide where to store apps and data. Read more here: Inside Marshmallow: Adoptable storage | Android Central

Removing or unmounting an adopted SD card might cause all manner of problems, since you're essentially taking out part of the system's storage. I'm not sure at which step the main problem may have occurred, but in the future, if you format a card as internal storage, don't worry about manually moving apps--just let the system install apps, and it should use the SD card on its own.
 

B. Diddy

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I can't say for sure, since I don't have a phone that has adoptable storage. My understanding is that you don't have to move the apps, since the system will decide where to store what. In general, you probably want apps to be on the physical internal storage if possible, since that will work faster. Physical SD cards will always have slower read/write speeds than onboard eMMC. However, according to Jerry in that AC article, the system apparently defaults to using the physical SD card when it's adopted.
 

philsim

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Hi, I have done the marshmallow upgrade on my Moto G 2nd gen and set up my 32 g SD card as system memory. In Es file explorer it displays the memory as just /device with 29 g free (8 gig system + 32 gig card). When I try to download apps I am still getting the message that there is not enough memory. As well as not being able to go over the old device memory limit, Marshmallow has also removed the option to move apps to the SD card. I am totally confused about this now.
Any ideas would be very welcome
 

Rukbat

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Installed as "system memory" (adoptable storage - it has nothing to do with memory [RAM]), the card becomes part of the phone's system storage. It's like adding some tracks to a hard drive. Android decides what gets put where. (And you can't pop the card out and put it into a computer or another phone - it's figuratively welded to the phone.) Since there's no longer an "external SD card", you can't "move" anything to it.

The reason you didn't have enough space when it was portable storage (the old way that we've known forever) is that you didn't have enough free internal storage - all apps (and files of any type) download to (and apps install to) internal storage. You can move them later if you like.

I'd set the card as portable storage, move those few apps that will move to the SD card (most won't these days - it depends on the libraries used to write them) and live with that arrangement until I could afford a phone with 128GB (or more, by that time) internal storage. (I'm still running a phone with 32GB internal, I'm a software junkie (I still have 5 podcast apps installed - I haven't taken the time to decide which one I like best) and I still have a bit over 21GB internal free. 8GB, which is what you have, isn't much these days. (And, as time goes on, it's going to become less. Apps are normally written to run in current phones. When almost all phones come in 1TB internal, there won't be an app that can install in 8GB. It's the same with PCs. There used to be an accounting program that could run in 32K [but in DOS, of course] - these days, if you can find a program that will run in Windows in 1MB, you've found a miracle.)