What is the point of external storage?

[BillyBoB15]

What is the point in having a sd card slot if all the larger games I get only transfer a few megabytes over and keep the bulk of its' data on the internal drive? Is there any way around this with out rooting or voiding my warranty at all?

 

[aokusman]

SD cards are not only for games.

 

[chanchan05]

The SD card slot is for media, like movies, pictures, music.

And its the devs who decide if their apps can go to the SD card or not. For example, Asphalt, Bard's Tale and Hearthstone can put up to 2GB of data on the SD card because their devs coded it that way.

An option is to turn on adoptive storage, to have the SD card be used as an extension of internal memory. But this will render the card useless for anything other than being on the phone. It can't be read by a computer anymore via card reader. Also this will make the phone slower, especially if you use slower classed cards, because SD cards are slower than the inboard flash memory. They also have a limited write number, hence they will fail early on if used as part of the main storage. Also, SD cards have a pretty high fail right in relation to onboard memory. If the SD card fails while being used as adoptive storage, worst case scenario is that all data placed in the card is irrecoverable with several data in the phone memory broken, requiring a factory reset. This is mitigated somewhar by making sure you use a genuine high quality high speed card (Samsung/Sony/Sandisk/PNY/Transcend/Kingston/TDK of UHS1-UHS3 speeds).

 

[Almeuit]

I would only use one for media. Other than that I'd never trust an SD card for valuable things like photos.

 

[Rukbat]

You can use one for all your media files, document files, anything but apps (that kills the card faster) - just make sure that everything - on the card and in internal storage - is backed up somewhere off the phone. Google Drive is an easy place, so is Mega. (The more valuable the file is, the more important it is to have a backup. Phones that get driven over, or dropped into mud puddles, normally can't have files recovered.)

 

[crolikman]

only once in ages I had a microSD dying on me. yes they do have a finite number of writes, however it can hardly be of an inconvenience unless a card is being used as a RAM swap. the one that DID in fact die was used as swap for SGS2 and did so after about a year of extensive use.

 

[chanchan05]

only once in ages I had a microSD dying on me. yes they do have a finite number of writes, however it can hardly be of an inconvenience unless a card is being used as a RAM swap. the one that DID in fact die was used as swap for SGS2 and did so after about a year of extensive use.

It's luck of the draw. I had a card suddenly die on me 6mos after being bought. Just straight up failed. But my Sandisk UHS1 is still going after 2 years of use.

 

[thoots]

External storage is for holding my entire music collection -- somewhere more than 64 gigabytes -- plus another 100 gigabytes or so of my favorite videos. And perhaps a picture or two. (256GB Samsung card, via the promotion when I bought my S7 Edge.) I don't do games on my phone. ;-)

 

[sparksd]

I store all of my music, my Audible Audio books, pictures, and documents on my 128GB card. I'm using about 45GB of the card at the moment.