Gadgetory

hello there my name is Gary Sims from Android authority now the whole debate about whether Android smartphone should have expandable storage has been raging for a number of years and it seems that the manufacturers can't make up their mind one year Samsung's flagship have expandable storage the next year they don't do that they do again the Nexus line never has expandable storage but the OEMs that make the Nexus line have expandable storage in their own phones it's a real roller coaster of a ride but if you do have microSD card support in your phone the question is is what is the largest capacity card that you can put in your phone now you might think it's a straightforward question but it actually isn't let me explain the SD card specification is defined by the SD Association and it's made up of a group of manufacturers both who make devices and those who make the memory card now the SD Association of currently defined three different types of SD card now when I say SD card I mean micro SD card and normal SD card because it's actually just a physical difference in the form factor but all the things about the specifications is exactly the same for both now the original SD card was up to two gigabytes and that was just called an SD card but we went past a two gigabyte limit a long time ago so therefore the Association brought out SD H see now SDHC has capacity limits up to 32 gigabytes and that might be a number you've seen somewhere for example a lot of smartphone manufacturers say expandable storage up to 32 gigabytes and that gives us a clue that they support SD HC now after SDHC came the next level which was SD XC now SDXC supports capacities up to 2 terabytes so technically any smartphone that supports SD XE can support card up to 2 terabytes of course 2 terabyte cards don't exist today and that's why sometimes when people read that 2 terabytes they say wow 2 terabytes blacks you can't buy a 2 terabyte card so therefore to keep consumer expectations at a reality level some smartphone manufacturers just say sdcard support up to 64 gigabytes or up to 128 gigabytes which are really the current cards that are available at the time and next year they might say up to 256 gigabytes or whatever the cards that are most commonly available then now while the SD Association defines the physical characteristics the pins are on the back of the card how the device is interact with each other the capacities they also define how the files are stored on the card now when a computer or when a phone wants to access a file it needs to know where in that block of 32 gigabytes or 64 gigabytes where the file is is it at the beginning is it at the end is it split over several different parts until you do that it needs what's called a file system now a file system on your Windows PC will probably something like NTFS or Linux may be using a ext for now one of the very most popular file systems dates back to the late 1970s and it's called fat file allocation table file system now fat was originally developed by Microsoft as I said back in the late 70s and it was used in Windows it was used in Windows 3.1 it was used in Windows 95 it was used in Windows 98 in fact you could even use it in Windows XP and actually turns out that the preferred type of file system for USB flash drives and for SD cards is fat there are different types of fat that's fat16 as fat32 there's even fat12 and fat16 over at the android authority comm website but the bottom line is this fat32 is the file system that is basically read by every type of computer in the world including linux including Mac's including windows including cameras including smartphones including media players it pretty is much universal however there's a small problem the first problem is that actually it's owned by Microsoft and actually some of the patents and the design rights the copyright of that falta to Martin by Microsoft and therefore you actually find out that a lot of the big OEMs have to pay Microsoft royalties for some of these things including for fat support and that's why actually Microsoft do we make quite a lot of money out of Android not because they particularly produce anything around although that's changing but because they actually get royalties from some of the big OMS now once we hit that 32 gigabyte limit with SD HC what happened then is that people start to look around at how good fat32 was for bigger and bigger file system there one of the limitations for fat32 is you can't have a file bigger than four gigabytes now I'm recording this video on a canon camera and my camera when it gets to a file size actually 2 gigabytes on this case but it could be 4 gigabytes on other cameras it has to stop the video recording and start recording in a new file because the files just too big for fat32 now of course really in the days of HD video 4k video 8k video these file sizes it can get really big very quickly so the SD Association decided they needed a new file system to replace fat32 for the SD XC standard and so they chose X fat extended fat but guess who extended fat belongs to you got it it belongs to Microsoft so here's another problem even the new standard that they come up with belongs to Microsoft and Android OEMs and camera manufacturers and all these people have to pay royalties to Microsoft 4x fat and because of that there's actually no X fat support officially in Linux if you were to boot up this a Ubuntu distribution you won't find X fat there because it is owned by Microsoft and they don't have the right to use it now of course there are open source implementations but having the code is one thing but having the legal right to use it is a whole different thing so here's an interesting thing if you are to format a micro SD card on a Windows machine if it's 32 gigabytes or less Windows will format it as fat32 but if it's bigger than 32 gigabytes it will format it as X fat now actually that also applies to for example USB thumb drives flash drives you put a USB flash drive a hundred twenty eight gigabyte one for example into your Windows desktop and you try to format it you cannot format it as fat32 it will only be formatted as ear X fat or as NTFS now it's actually during my testing which we'll get to in a moment I found out is actually the difference between the support for fat32 and the support for X fat which seems to be the biggest stumbling block in getting any particular smartphone to support a micro SD card bigger than 32 gigabytes all that theory is very nice but what does it mean practice what does it mean in the real world well what I've done is I've done a number of tests so that we can see first of all I took a hundred and twenty eight gigabyte USB flash drive and connected it to a variety of Android smartphones using a micro USB to USB OTG converter cable I also took a hundred and twenty eight gigabyte micro SD card and use that in a variety of devices and see whether that was recognized now here's the interesting thing my USB Drive came pre formatted as fat32 even though it's a 128 gigabyte but the micro SD card came pre formatted as exFAT and in fact I reformatted both cards in the opposite file systems to see whether that had any effect so let's start with the my USB 128 gigabyte might be USB flash drive well the first thing I did was I plugged it into a Raspberry Pi and guess what it was not recognized when it was formatted as X fact but it was recognized when it was formatted as fat32 I then took the same USB Drive and kicked it to my Ubuntu laptop and guess what again when it was formatted as X fact it wasn't recognized but it was formatted as fat32 it was so here we can see from the start that the Linux support for exFAT is limited whereas for fat32 it seems to be okay I then took the mic this USB flash driver cutting into my sony televisions got a USB port on it and it can show photos and things like that and again when it was in fat32 mode it was read by the Sony television but when it was formatted as X fact it was not read by the Sony television I know what about Android phones will actually I can't fit to a variety of Android phone and when it was formatted as fat32 it all worked finally I can't get to a note 4 to an oppo f1 plus to a zenfone even to an Amazon Kindle Fire and it worked absolutely fine but when it was in exFAT mode some of those devices weren't able to read it now more interestingly I took the micro SD card which is 128 gigabytes and starting with it formatted as X fact I put it into a variety of devices now actually it worked in most of the phones I've actually quite surprised how well it worked in fact it worked on the note 4 it worked on the Oppo f1 plus it worked on the galaxy s7 it worked on the note 5 it worked on the Kindle Fire it worked on just about anything I could throw it at but there were a few devices that it didn't work on and let me tell you about those this exFAT formatted 128 gigabyte microSD card did not work on the xiaomi redmi note 2 on the ZTE star 2 or on the le phone piece Ickx thousand now what hackney happened is when I put them in those phones the phone just didn't even recognize there was an SD card there however on the redmi note 2 it did actually say do you want to format this card because it didn't recognize the exFAT format and then when I reformatted it actually reformatted it as fat32 and guess what then it worked and in fact when I took that fat32 formatted micro sd card and put it into the ZT star - and when I put it into the elephone p2000 it worked then as well so basically the pattern built up like this even though the cards are 128 gigabytes even though they're bigger than that 32 gigabyte that's defined by the SD HD standard most phones will actually read them because they have support for exFAT and the phones that don't read them because I don't have support for exFAT will read them if you format them as fat32 so what does all this mean well basically actually means that if you do buy a card that's bigger than 32 gigabytes you've got a high chance and all work in your phone even phones that say they only support 32 gigabytes but the trick will be to reformat the card as fat32 well my name is Gary Sims from Andrew authority I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it a thumbs up please don't forget to subscribe download and authority app or to use the comments below to tell me your experience of using large microSD card in your Android phone and most of all don't forget to go to Android or e-comm because we are your source for all things Android