How to Use SD Card as Internal Storage

Android smartphones come equipped with a plethora of features and because Android is an open-source OS, there’s plenty of stuff to do when it comes to customization. As such, hundreds of issues can be solved and ironed out, but there is one issue that seems to bother many Android users. Of course, we are talking about lack of internal storage space. Using an SD card is great when you want to download bonus music, video clips, photos or documents, but SD card isn’t going to get you far when it comes to the apps. In today’s article, we are going to see how you can use your SD card as internal storage.

How to use SD Card as Internal Storage

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist when it comes to using your SD card as Internal Storage. In fact, this is very simple and will take you no more than ten minutes. If you have your SD card with yourself, unpack it and follow the steps below.

1. Grab your SD card, open your phone’s SD card slot and insert it.
2. Wait a few seconds (or minutes), until your SD card gets detected.
3. Open your app list and then go to Settings.
4. In Settings, scroll a little bit down and find the Storage section.
5. In this section, you’ll see that you have an Internal Storage and your SD card. Usually, there is a name of your SD card, which isn’t really important.
6. If you see your SD card, this means that it’s detected. Now select your SD card.
7. Upon opening, you’ll see the name of your SD card at the top, and just next to it, to the right side, you’ll see three vertical dots. Tap on them.
8. There will be few options available, but you need to choose Storage Settings.
9. When choosing Storage Settings, a new menu will open, offering you three options. Select Format as Internal.

10. The new window will open, giving you a warning about your loss of data and the things we mentioned. In the lower-right corner, click on ERASE & FORMAT to proceed.
11. Depending on the speed of your SD card, your Android device will either notify you that your SD card is slow or won’t display anything at all. If you receive this info, just select Ok.
12. Android will now calculate how much time you need to transfer the desired amount of data and you can select either Move Now or Move Later.
13. Tick the option you want and then tap Ok.
14. Wait for the process to finish.
15. When you see that your SD card is ready, tap OK.

How to revert the changes

It’s great that you’ve done what you wanted with your SD card, but what if you want to make it portable again? Well, that’s also very easy and you can do it in just a couple of steps. To make your SD card portable again, follow the steps below.

1. Assuming that your SD card is on your phone, open your app list and go to Settings.
2. In settings, scroll down and select Storage.
3. Again, you’ll see the list of your available storage drives and you should see your SD card’s name as well.
4. Select your SD card.
5. Tap the three vertical dots in the upper-right corner of the display.
6. If you remember it before you’ve formatted your card, you saw the option Format as Internal. Now, there will be “Format as Portable” option which you’ll need to tap.

7. If you’ve carefully read the warning, just click on FORMAT button, located at the bottom of the screen.
8. The process will last around five minutes and you’re good to go once it’s finished.

Possible issues

SD Cards are great for expanding your overall memory, but they are sometimes painfully slow. In this case, you want to purchase a more beefy SD card and of course, pay a couple of bucks above. This is very important because even if your SD card is working, your Android phone might reject it just because it’s too slow. Also, these storages have a limited number of read-write cycles, meaning that degradation of performance is inevitable. With that in mind, you want to look out for faster SD cards and this should be your top priority. If you don’t have a fast SD card, then you can have GBs of data and still see poor performance.

Conclusion

We saw that converting your SD card into internal memory isn’t that complicated. You don’t even need a specialized app to do so. However, be careful how you treat your memory, because once you accidentally format your SD card, there isn’t going back. Beware that the number of benefits, in this case, is almost as equal as a number of drawbacks. Do you really want more memory of a faster memory? If your answer is more, then you can rely on this option to do the job. However, if the performance is what you seek, then no- you won’t see any significant benefit from this. Be sure to always back up your data before you do formatting.