SD Cards Slow Down Android... Sorry if it's been asked before...

[natehoy]

An SD card can slow a phone down, and have bad effects on the phone. This is especially true under a couple of circumstances.

1. It's a slower SD card and you tell your phone to write things like pictures and movies to it. This not only increases lag from picture to picture as the image is written, it take more power.

2. A file gets corrupted on the SD card, and the Android System service continually tries to index it, fails, repeats, fails, repeats, etc. That can be disastrous in terms of CPU utilization, overall system performance, and battery life.

 

[David Rosen]

2. A file gets corrupted on the SD card, and the Android System service continually tries to index it, fails, repeats, fails, repeats, etc. That can be disastrous in terms of CPU utilization, overall system performance, and battery life.

I think this is the reason. Unfortunately there's like nothing you can do about it because stuff like that seems to always happen when using an SD card with a phone. Which is why I'd rather just have 128gb internal storage. Or even 256gb. Or more.

 

[muzzy996]

I think this is the reason. Unfortunately there's like nothing you can do about it because stuff like that seems to always happen when using an SD card with a phone. Which is why I'd rather just have 128gb internal storage. Or even 256gb. Or more.

I recall a case where a user placed several hundred media files (i think it was comics) onto a card and had continous media server scan issues despite formatting the card multiple times. There was a bad file within the batch somewhere from the source and in a case like that placing the bad file into internal memory would still cause issues. Point being, the external card isn't always the source of corruption but I do get your point, more internal is better in general.

 

[toenail_flicker]

Or more.

:twothumbsup:

 

[natehoy]

I think this is the reason. Unfortunately there's like nothing you can do about it because stuff like that seems to always happen when using an SD card with a phone. Which is why I'd rather just have 128gb internal storage. Or even 256gb. Or more.

I'd rather have more internal memory, too. But it's also relatively expensive, and still not expandable beyond whatever comes in the phone.

It's all in the trade-off. I like the idea of being able to take 32GB of music if I went to Canada (where data is EXPENSIVE) for a few weeks. That way I don't have to find a WiFi hotspot to download the specific albums I might want on a given day. Could I use an OTG to copy a few albums in? Sure. And I would consider that an acceptable alternative if phone manufacturers started pulling SD slots entirely. But it's not as convenient.

I guess I'd rather have 256GB *and* a $2 slot I never put a chip in, just in case I ever want to put a chip in it.

 

[Trinlu27]

So I know plenty of people will probably get riled up over this, but I'm gonna ask it anyway...

Do Android phones get slowed down by having an SD card installed?

Before you jump right to the NO answer, because I know that most people think that this is one of the major plusses of Android as an OS, and everyone uses SD cards... Hear me out...

I've had a T-Mobile G1, G2, MyTouch 4g Slide, Galaxy S3, Note 3 and Note 4. With every single one of them I've used SD cards. I've always had pitifully slow experiences, but I love Android so I stick around. It's always great when I first get it, or after a system wipe. But once I put in an SD card, things start to slow down. No I haven't been using the same SD card. Yes I've formatted the SD cards in various stages of using them. They're all top of the line, highly recommended cards. Whatever is recommended in the forums as the best of the best at that time is what I've gotten. They're not particularly full. The main reason I get them is for the camera, because all those pictures and videos can fill up my internal storage which I have to use for apps and games. I currently have around 10gb free on my 32gb Note 4. I wiped my phone (and formatted my 64gb card) less than a month ago because of bad performance. After getting all set back up and running great, I popped back in my freshly formatted 64gb card. Pretty much right away I started noticing the difference in performance. Now it's been a month and I actually have stuff on the card, and it's just dreadful. Opening the camera can take a solid 10 seconds. Sometimes I hit home and everything is just frozen for 5-10 seconds before the home comes back up. Opening Facebook brings up a white screen for at least 3-5 seconds. Opening the app switcher always takes 5 seconds (that's a known bug from what I've read). It's just laggy. It's awful. And again, I've formatted the card, so I know there's not some data on it that's causing the issues. As for whether or not it's the card itself? Well like I said, in a history of 6 phones, I've probably had 8 or 9 different cards. So while I haven't specifically tried a different card in THIS phone, I can 99% guarantee that a different card wouldn't make a difference. Plus if that WAS the problem... What did I get 8 or 9 bad cards out of 8 or 9 cards? is the microSD card industry that bad? haha.

So anyway. I think this weekend I'm gonna figure out what is on my card currently since the last format (who knows what apps put what on there), and see if it will be cool for me to just pop out the card and try living SD-free for a little bit, even though it's gonna be impossible to manage storage with just the 32gb included. But if it works faster, then I'll know for sure.

In the meantime, I'm just curious. Am I alone here? I know I'm not, because I have a couple friends who used to call me crazy but have recently started saying (and acting like it's THEIR observation and I never said it before) that Android with an SD Card in sucks. But I'm wondering in this forum, since I"ve gotten help in here in the past, who agrees with me?

Here's hoping the T-Mobile variant of the Note 5 has a bare minimum of 64gb storage (praying for 128). I'll gladly pay extra for it.

I don't care what anyone says I know for a fact that a full external SD card will slow your phone down a little bit especially if you have your apps on your SD card your phone has to look for that app on your SD card and so it has to search through all that garbage to find it...but I think the problem you're having is there are a lot of files that your phone puts in its own internal memory that you can't see everything you do every application you download it builds a file log reports excetera excetera and you can't see them unless you have a rooted device and know where to look....from the time you pull your phone out of the box brand new and turn it on it starts putting files on the internal memory

 

[sparksd]

I've had a full 128GB card in my Note 4 and an empty card and no card and seen no difference in performance in the year+ that I have owned it.

 

[Coraya]

I don't care what anyone says I know for a fact that a full external SD card will slow your phone down a little bit especially if you have your apps on your SD card your phone has to look for that app on your SD card and so it has to search through all that garbage to find it...but I think the problem you're having is there are a lot of files that your phone puts in its own internal memory that you can't see everything you do every application you download it builds a file log reports excetera excetera and you can't see them unless you have a rooted device and know where to look....from the time you pull your phone out of the box brand new and turn it on it starts putting files on the internal memory

Must've been a software issue. No problem here either

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[eshropshire]

If an SD card slows down your phone and you don't like it then I suggest you not use one. I personally have been using SD Cards in my phones since 2011 and like the functionality.

The only problem I have had is with my old S4. On one android Verizon, I can't remember which one it would corrupt the SD card every few months. I replaced the phone and I had no more problems. My daughter has been using the S4 for over a year and has had no problems.

I really don't get all the fuss about SD Cards. Samsung wanted to get rid of them last year to force buyers to pay more for their phones. I am glad they have seen the light in 2017 and are no longer trying to follow Apple.

 

[ratsttam]

What I found, is that the cheap sd cards (usually found on e-bay), cause problems and slow downs, assuming that they work properly at all.

If you're using an SD card, get the fastest one you can afford in the highest capacity you can afford. If you've got a slow card, and any apps you're using are on it, it'll be slow. The faster cards are still slower than internal memory, however, it's a lot less noticeable compared to a slower card.

At the end of the day, I find the advantages of having the SD card installed (moving large apps that aren't speed important) and keeping my media/pictures on it, more than makes up for any minute difference in speed I may have.

 

[nahoku]

I've not noticed any SD slowdowns on my Note 4. Granted, if you think about it, there will be some minimal time it takes to fetch data from the SD, but nothing close to what the OP has seen... 5 - 10 second delays. When you see that kind of lag, you have to look somewhere else or you just plain have a bad phone or SD card. It's not the norm just because you use a SD card in a phone.

 

[anon(5719825)]

I've never noticed any slowing down on any of my phones by using an SD card.

I did notice on my S7 Edge that after I put over 7,000 songs on an SD card, the phone took about an hour to index the music on there and it used about 10 % of the battery to do so.

I don't really use my Note 4/Note Edge much anymore.

 

[TrevorX]

Actually, while there's a great deal of opinion here, there is very little in the way of actual verifiable fact. NEC Labs did do some proper research in this area - you can read it here. The conclusion they came to was... No, wait, let me quote them:

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find evidence that storage is a significant contributor to application performance on mobile devices; our experiments provide insight into the Android storage stack and reveal its correlation with application performance. Surprisingly, we find that even for an interactive application such as web browsing, storage can affect the performance in non-trivial ways; for I/O intensive applications, the effects can get much more pronounced. With the advent of faster networks and I/O interconnects on the one hand, and a more diverse, powerful set of mobile apps on the other, the performance required from storage is going to increase in the future."

So yes, the performance of your SD card does have an effect on the performance of your phone/device, irrespective of whether or not you think the device is actually accessing content on the card. The take-home message is, if you're going to use an SD card, make it a very fast one.

Just on the subject of Class Ratings for cards, that is pretty much meaningless because the classes have failed to keep up with potential drive performance. For example, a Class 10 drive only has to achieve a whopping... 10MB/s. Pretty much every cheap nasty card in existence can do that. Even the UHS class 3 is a measly 30MB/s. Compare that to cards like the Samsung EVO+ which are hitting close to 90MB/s, or the new Sandisk Extreme Pro MicroSDXC UHS-II which Sandisk claim is capable of 275MB/s.

The Samsung EVO+ is by far the best price/performance card out there right now, so that's what you should be using - they're quite cheap, yet perform very well, so importantly won't have a performance impact on your phone. Whatever you use, make sure it has fast write performance (80MB/s or greater). Do not use cheap, low performance SD cards in your phone - it will kill its performance with everything you do.

 

[Kintar0]

On my wife's Huawei Y530 if I put a 32GB (cheap class 10) SD card it begin to lag instantly. Even if it's not used.

 

[Vegas in the HOUSE]

So I know plenty of people will probably get riled up over this, but I'm gonna ask it anyway...

Do Android phones get slowed down by having an SD card installed?

Before you jump right to the NO answer, because I know that most people think that this is one of the major plusses of Android as an OS, and everyone uses SD cards... Hear me out...

I've had a T-Mobile G1, G2, MyTouch 4g Slide, Galaxy S3, Note 3 and Note 4. With every single one of them I've used SD cards. I've always had pitifully slow experiences, but I love Android so I stick around. It's always great when I first get it, or after a system wipe. But once I put in an SD card, things start to slow down. No I haven't been using the same SD card. Yes I've formatted the SD cards in various stages of using them. They're all top of the line, highly recommended cards. Whatever is recommended in the forums as the best of the best at that time is what I've gotten. They're not particularly full. The main reason I get them is for the camera, because all those pictures and videos can fill up my internal storage which I have to use for apps and games. I currently have around 10gb free on my 32gb Note 4. I wiped my phone (and formatted my 64gb card) less than a month ago because of bad performance. After getting all set back up and running great, I popped back in my freshly formatted 64gb card. Pretty much right away I started noticing the difference in performance. Now it's been a month and I actually have stuff on the card, and it's just dreadful. Opening the camera can take a solid 10 seconds. Sometimes I hit home and everything is just frozen for 5-10 seconds before the home comes back up. Opening Facebook brings up a white screen for at least 3-5 seconds. Opening the app switcher always takes 5 seconds (that's a known bug from what I've read). It's just laggy. It's awful. And again, I've formatted the card, so I know there's not some data on it that's causing the issues. As for whether or not it's the card itself? Well like I said, in a history of 6 phones, I've probably had 8 or 9 different cards. So while I haven't specifically tried a different card in THIS phone, I can 99% guarantee that a different card wouldn't make a difference. Plus if that WAS the problem... What did I get 8 or 9 bad cards out of 8 or 9 cards? is the microSD card industry that bad? haha.

So anyway. I think this weekend I'm gonna figure out what is on my card currently since the last format (who knows what apps put what on there), and see if it will be cool for me to just pop out the card and try living SD-free for a little bit, even though it's gonna be impossible to manage storage with just the 32gb included. But if it works faster, then I'll know for sure.

In the meantime, I'm just curious. Am I alone here? I know I'm not, because I have a couple friends who used to call me crazy but have recently started saying (and acting like it's THEIR observation and I never said it before) that Android with an SD Card in sucks. But I'm wondering in this forum, since I"ve gotten help in here in the past, who agrees with me?

Here's hoping the T-Mobile variant of the Note 5 has a bare minimum of 64gb storage (praying for 128). I'll gladly pay extra for it.

I'm here because I started having problems with my Samsung S5 Android version 5. I put in a SanDisk 4GB awhile ago. Initially it seemed to help as it freed up phone memory by allowing me to store photos there. Moved pictures there and I moved some Apps there. Then one day I moved even more Apps to the SD card. Seemed to work fine. Then a few days later I started having issues. Slow, rebooting constantly, and one thing I noticed was I all of a sudden couldn't use some Apps, especially Apps that cleaned memory cashe and cleaned the smart phone. These Apps would run forever, never finish running the task and either the phone would reboot on its own or I'd stop the App. What I also noticed is that when I went to Settings and looked at Storage or tried to look at Storage it showed the SD card no problem, but could not read the smart phone memory. In the past i never had that issue. So I decided to reset to factory settings. So I used the "backup and reset" function. This worked great as a backup and reset of your smart phone to factory and saving all your information to load back and my smart phone worked better, but still had some of the same problems. Still with "Storage" could not read the smart phone memory. Because I could always see the SD card info with no problem I never took it out and during the reset to factory I did not use the option to reformat the SD card as part of the factory reset. So I read this forum and take out the SD card and guess what. That fixed all the problems. Now when I started having these issues was right after I decided to take a picture and use the "location tag " option. I turned it on and took some pictures and started having this problem minutes later. Not sure this caused the issue along with something else or not, but wanted to add that info here. I'm going to put the SD card back in and do the factory reset again and this time format the SD card as part of the factory reset and see if that fixes the problem.
"I'll Be Back"

 

[David Rosen]

Hope things go well but I've basically given up and use the SD card cause I NEED to but accept I'm gonna have slowdown and issues haha. Good news is my new s7 edge is definitely the best phone I've ever had as far as performance with or without an SD card is concerned...definitely less good with though haha

 

[sparksd]

No, I don't see any slowdown using a 128GB card in my Note 4 (and I have done the with/without test).

 

[Julio_A_Garcia]

Hello, just to add my little bit of experience, I have a Moto G3 more than one year. About six months ago, I tought how nice will be to install a 64GB SD Card, so I bought a SanDisk 64GB Micro SD XC I (10), format it and put it in my G3. For a few days all was perfect, after some time my phone didn't recognize the SD Card, all my questions to forums, were answered about the limit of 32 GB for the Moto G3. So I forget the SD Card and live without it.

Two weeks ago, I realize here https://motorola-global-portal.custhelp.com/app/answers/prod_answer_detail/a_id/109134/p/1449,9582, that with Android 6 last update I was able to format my SD Card with the so called Internal Storage format. I did that and alas! the SD Card returns to life, and I was able to put all my photos and other stuff there, BUT after some days I realize, how slowly was becoming my phone, the most notorious was when I use the Swiftkey keyboard, and on my own I thought that the culprit was my reborn SD Card.

Today Jan 13, 2017, reading the first entry of this thread I have to say that YES, the SD Card, at least this SanDisk will be used as an USB storage with an adaptator, and I will have to return to my 16 GB of internal memory.

 

[Adrian Abaja]

I also have this issue and that oerson who mentioned that slower sd cards are more noticeable in speed is correct. A year later with my phone, 2+GB was left on my card since I only have 8gb ( dont ask how i can live with that much space ) and every time i open my phone from sleep, it wont open, i need to atleast press the power key two times to open my phone. when i removed the card however, it was quicker to open my phone and man was i suprised

 

[natehoy]

I also have this issue and that oerson who mentioned that slower sd cards are more noticeable in speed is correct. A year later with my phone, 2+GB was left on my card since I only have 8gb ( dont ask how i can live with that much space ) and every time i open my phone from sleep, it wont open, i need to atleast press the power key two times to open my phone. when i removed the card however, it was quicker to open my phone and man was i suprised

There's a very good chance you had a corrupted file sometime during that year, and the Android media indexer was repeatedly trying to generate a preview, thumbnail, or music list entry for the bad file. That would mean that at least one process thread was running continuously, 24/7, consuming CPU. So with that background process running, failing, restarting, running, failing, lather rinse repeat - there might be a noticeable lag in the operation of the rest of the phone (and a reduction in battery life).