Samsung storage: USB v. Internal SD v. External SD

[netarc]

I had started a thread in the droid general forum, assuming the issue I was seeing was droid/gingerbread-specific, but became aware that it's specific to how Samsung handles internal/external storage on their phones, so posting here in case anyone has an answer?

So as I understand it, the USB and Internal SD are partitions of the standard 16GB of flash memory on the phone; the SYSTEM STORAGE has ~2GB, while the "USB" is ~11GB.

I then added a 32GB microSD card, which becomes the "External SD"; see the screenshot from the built-in task manager app below...

Terminology aside, here's my issue ... when I move apps (using the native Gingerbread move2SD method) to SD card, they end up on the internal SD, not the 32GB external SD. Is there a way to designate the external SD as the target for apps when moving them?

It appears that when apps are first installed, they are installed by default to the SYSTEM; I say this because I installed a bunch of apps b4 attempting to move any of them to the SD. When I did move them (after I had installed the 32GB SD card), I saw the system storage go down, while USB storage went up ... but SD Card stayed the same, iirc. Moreover, if I use MY FILES to check contents of /sdcard/external_sd, all I see within are the directories DCIM (camera pictures), download and LOST.DIR ... no evidence of any apps.

So I'm presuming from this that the migrated apps ended up in USB storage, and I'm wondering - how can I move them to the external SD card? Or, if they are actually already there, where would I navigate in the directory to check what is actually stored on the SD card (e.g., if /sdcard/external_sd is not giving the complete picture).

 

[netarc]

BTW, my goal is to move apps which I use less frequently, particularly large ones, to the external SD card. I suspect loading an app from SD wouldn't be much slower than loading one from internal memory, though even if it is I can live with that for less commonly accessed apps.

More to the point,I want to ensure that apps which in turn download media (eg podcast managers) are forced to use the external SD card....and since those I've looked at don't support designating the download dir in their settings, seemed the only way to do this was to move the app ourself to SD.

 

[BugDad25]

great question. I was wondering the same thing

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I777 using Tapatalk

 

[vientiane]

I move them using APP 2 SD in the market

 

[tunie]

There are some complicated (for me anyway) ways to make the default download location your SD card. You just need to be rooted and know how to use the SDK. Some apps won't run properly from the SD card or will run slowly. I use Gemini App Manager from the market. I've found it's able to move apps to SD that APP2SD can't seem to move. I think it works better if you're rooted, but it's not required to use the app. Might be worth a try.