Does all android phones and tablets support external SD card with size one tb if so how to.

[rupeshforu3]

Hi I am Rupesh from India and I have lenovo a3000h tab and 64 GB external SD card and I want to use it in lenovo tab.

Few months back I was discussing with some people in hydrogen audio ( a forum which discusses about audio technologies) and one person raised question that every android device manufactured up to now supports external SD card of size 2 tb provided there is a slot for it. I have argued that it's impossible because manufacturer places restrictions such as "the phone xyz manufactured by me only supports upto 64 GB" etc.,. He has never accepted me.

He said that if the memory card is formatted with fat file system then any android device can read and write files to it because android has the ability to access external SD card of size upto 2tb. He also argued that it is related to android os and not with hardware. Is it true.

At present I have android tab called lenovo a3000h and its manual stated that it supports external SD card of size 32 GB. I also have external SD card Samsung evo of size 64 GB and it is of type sdxc with uhs1 file transfer. Is there any possibility of using it.

Can anyone of you suggest if it is possible to format SD card I mean to which file system I have to format in order to access it in the tab specified above.

Regards,
Rupesh.

 

[SpookDroid]

Technically, you're right. Any device that supports cards in the 64GB range are, by standard definition, also able to read up to 2TB cards (but for microSD cards the highest you can go right now is 512GB,and even that card from ONE manufacturer is only shipping until February 2018). IF the manufacturer decided to tweak the OS for some reason and place restrictions on file sizes and address allocations, then yeah, the OS would be hindering itself 'useless' beyond a certain point (Think of having a neighborhood with 100 streets but with a mailman who decides to only deliver mail to the first 50 street. No matter what you do, to that mailman, the rest of the streets are unavailable, even if they are there and he technically could deliver there). Not sure, however, how you can test this. Android itself doesn't place this restriction. Manufacturers state the card size that the device is rated for because that's what they tested. If a card beyond that fails, they have an 'I told you so' card in case something goes wrong.

 

[Rukbat]

Devices that support only up to 32GB support the FAT32 filesystem.

Devices that support 64GB or larger support the exFAT filesystem, which goes up to 2TB. So if the device accepts 64GB, 128GB or 200/256GB, it supports up to 2TB cards. (There are none yet - the largest card currently made is 256GB - until next month.) So yes, it's true.

As SpookDroid said, those are the only limitations. No manufacturer would be foolish enough to make a device that supports the exFAT filesystem on the external SD card, but limits you to some size under 2TB. What would they gain from that? There's no difference in the hardware or firmware, except that they'd have to write firmware to set the limit - which would cost them more.

 

[rupeshforu3]

I have inserted one of my friends 128 GB sandisk sdxc micro SD card in lenovo a3000h tab and I am able to access all the contents present in that memory card. It is formatted as fat.