Which apps support SD card storage?

Discuss The Products
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I want to use my SD card of my upcoming Fairphone 4 for a few apps:

  • Nextcloud file syncing
  • YouTube Music offline downloaded songs
  • My own MP3s to be used by YT Music
  • Google Maps offline downloaded areas
  • Synced email (Outlook for work and Librem Mail for private)
  • Signal backups
  • Pictures and videos shot on Fairphone (I read about a few bugs that are triggered when using the SD card storage?)
  • Offline Google Play Movies

Things like that. I haven’t had an SD card option since my HTC Desire I think… So this is a bit foreign to me by now. Is there still a lot of support for this? Because I have a feeling that it’s only useful for MP3s and other personal file storage, where maybe some apps are able to find and read them.

How do you use your SD card? Is this above list realistic?

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SD card as external
No problem, but it’s likely that some apps won’t install on the SD card when it’s external, but anything media you download can be.

Still you are talking about something no one knows about yet and with Android 11 ??

Using as internal can be a problem.

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Thanks, that topic you link to is very informative. Formatting it as internal doesn’t sound very good. Even if it was better supported. Because the performance of the internal storage is probably much faster than the SD card. Mixing those might degrade the overall performance (a bit of a NUMA effect, but then for storage). So I guess I’ll format it as external and will only stash some music and movies on it and use it as a portable drive for non-private data.

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Luckily the FP4 can be bought with 256Gb memory which hopefully cope with fussy apps :slight_smile:

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Indeed, that’s the model I ordered as well :nerd_face:

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Sadly I have two FP3+ less than a year old so will follow how you get on with the FP4

Good luck

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Not every microSD card is equal. See my post here about consumer vs industrial grade flash storage FP4: The specs and your opinions - #168 by JeroenH

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Bought shop SDs for ever and never had a problem, maybe the shops I go to are OK. I don’t buy online :slight_smile:

Still using 2Gb with lifetime warranty, not that I kept the receipt. :slight_smile:

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SL-C1000 (~2004) → SD card went bad. Internal flash FS issues required reinstall.

Nokia N810 (~2007) → SD card went bad. Internal flash FS issues required reinstall.

Nokia N900 (~2010) → SD card went bad. Internal flash FS issues required reinstall.

One 16 GB USB thumb I had (I admit for quite some years but barely used): destroyed recently, suddenly. 2 GB USB drive of my wife, a few times used it as live CD and boom doesn’t work anymore. 4 GB one still alive, used to replace a 4 GB USB drive in an Edgerouter Lite (3 years old). Bet the replacement gonna die soon tho, cause it was used in past to make a Hackintosh boot. PATA <-> flash on a Pentium OpenBSD router (self-build, around 2005 or so?) IIRC it was like 32 MB or something low like that. Went bad after a few years. Gotta love /var/log I guess.

SSD which gone bad just by running Debian GNU/Linux Testing on my Thinkpad (~2008-2010). I guess I shouldn’t use a lot of tabs in the browser.

I’m not even counting all the Raspberry Pi installations which went borked. Because God forbid you write to flash. After going with /var/log on tmpfs, things got more sane, but that’s an ugly hack.

Sure, HDDs died, too. But not as much, and not as quick. They actually got a funny curve: they usually die at the very beginning (DOA), or they last long (there’s some exceptions like bad series like Deathstar). IIRC I got that from data by Backblaze.

SSDs have improved ever since that fiasco on the Thinkpad though. They can handle much more writes nowadays, even consumer-grade.

The amount of industrial grade and commercial grade (micro)SD flash which I managed to destroy past years: ZERO. And I got like 6 or so (?) in use. I do get it; I actually use my hardware…

You get what you pay for… :slight_smile:

But there’s good news! On a smartphone, you can work around all of the above by not writing to the microSD card much (or actually: by doing it, thereby saving the internal soldered flash!). For example, you can have that entire MP3 collection on your microSD, and read it a lot, but not writing these lovely precious GBs. High quality Netflix would degrade your SD quicker than low quality. But since SD cards are kind of cheap anyway, you can work around it by writing it off when it dies. Just make sure you got backups!

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OMG! you’ve really bought some trash, where did you go shopping?

Funny how some people get what could be considered ‘bad’ luck

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Yes indeed you’re right, that’s known. I’ve added it to the guide as I noticed it wasn’t there.

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Nothing to do with shops. It depends on use cases, usage intensity and quite simply luck.

Just what I could find quickly from my “flash memory which gave up working for devices” collection, everything bought from well-known shops (as opposed to obscure internet outfits popping up in price comparison portals from time to time):

  • Samsung MB-MSAGA Essential Class 6 microSDHC 16GB
  • Adata Class 4 microSDHC 32GB
  • Transcend MM8GR01GUACA-NA microSD 1GB (Samsung made, if the internet is to be believed)
  • Transcend JetFlash T3 USB 2.0 stick 1GB
  • Kingston DataTraveler DTU30G3 Ultimate Generation 3 USB 3.0 stick 64GB

That you can’t have unlimited write operations to flash memory is well-known, but apparently controllers in flash memory devices may simply stop writing for whatever invisible reason, rendering a flash memory device read-only. And that’s the “good” failure in which you at least get to keep your data because you can still read it.

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