"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello 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 flagships have expandable storage the next year they don't the year after 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 Micro SD card support in your phone the question is this 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 cards now the SD Association have currently defined three different types of SD card now when I say SD card I mean micro SD card and normal SD card because there'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 2 gb and that was just called an SD card but we went past the 2 GB limit a long time ago so therefore the association brought out SD HC now SDHC has capacity limits up to 32 GB and that might be a number you've seen somewhere for example a lot of smartphone manufacturers say expandable storage up to 32 GB and that gives us a clue that they support SDHC now after SDHC came the next level which was SDXC now SDXC supports capacities up to 2 terb so technically any smartphone that supports SDXC can support cards up to 2 terab and of course 2 terab cards don't exist today and that's why sometimes when people read that 2 terabytes they say wow 2 terabytes but actually you can't buy a 2 terabyte card so therefore to keep consumer expectations at the reality level some smartphone manufacturers might just say SD card support up to 64 GB or up to 128 GB which are really the current cards that are available at the time and next year they might say up to 256 GB or whatever the cards that are most commonly available then now while the SD Association defines the physical characteristics SS the pins are on the back of the card how the devices 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 Gaby or 64 GB where the file is is it at the beginning is it at the end is it split over several different parts and to you do that it needs what's called a file system now a file system on your Windows PC will probably be something like NT FS on Linux maybe using ext4 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 it actually turns out that the preferred type or file system for uh USB flash drives and for SD cards is fat now there are different types of fat there's fat 16 there's fat 32 there's even fat 12 and fat 8 if you want to know a bit more about fat then please go over and look at the article that accompanies this video over at the androidauthority.com webbsite but the bottom line is this fat 32 is the file system that is basically read by every type of computer in the world including Linux including uh Macs 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 copyrights of that file system are owned 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 actually make quite a lot of money out of Android not because they particularly produce anything for Android although that's changing but because they actually get royalties from some of the big oems now once we hit that 32 GB limit with SD HC what happened then is that people started to look around at how good fat 32 was for bigger and bigger file system now one of the limitations for fat 32 is you can't have a file bigger than 4 GB now I'm recording this video on a Canon camera and my camera when it gets to a file so actually 2 GB on this case but it could be 4 GB on another camera it has to stop the video recording and start recording in a new file because the file's just too big for fat 32 now of course really in the days of HD video 4K video 8K video These file sizes are going to get really big very quickly so the SD Association decided they needed a new file system to replace fat 32 for the SDXC 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 for X fat and because of that there's actually no xat support officially in Linux if you were to boot up let's say a Ubuntu distribution you won't find xat there because it is owned by Microsoft and they don't have the right to use it now of course there are open sources 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 GB or less windows will format it as fat 32 but if it's bigger than 32 GB it will format it as X fat now actually that also applies to for example USB thumb drives flash drives if you put a USB flash drive a 12 8 GB 1 for example into your Windows desktop and you try to format it you cannot format it as fat 32 it will only be formatted as airx fat or as NTFS now it's actually during my testing which we'll get to in a moment I found out it's actually the difference between the support for fat 32 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 GB well that theory is very nice but what does it mean in 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 128 gigabyte USB flash drive and connected it to a variety of Android smartphones using a micro USB to a usb OTG converter cable I also took a 128 GB micro SD card and used 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 fat 32 even though it's 128 GB but the micro SD card came pre-formatted as X fat and in fact I reformatted both cards in the opposite uh file systems to see whether that had any effect so let's start with the my USB uh 128 GB M 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 xat but it was recognized when it was formatted as fat 32 I then took the same USB uh drive and connected it to my Ubuntu laptop and guess what again when it was formatted as X fat it wasn't recognized but it was formatted as fat 32 it was so here we can see from the start that the Linux support for X fat is limited whereas for fat 32 it seems to be okay I then took the mic this USB flash drive and Connect into my Sony television it's got a USB port on it and it can show photos and things like that and again when it was in fat 32 mode it was read by the Sony television but when it was formatted as xat it was not read by the Sony television and then what about Android phones well actually I connected it to a variety of Android phones and when it was formatted as fat 32 it all worked fine I even I connected it to a note 4 to an opo F1 plus to a Zen phone 2 even to an Amazon Kindle Fire and it worked absolutely fine but when it was in xat mode some of those devices weren't able to read it now more interestingly I took the micro SD card which is 128 GB and starting with it formatted as xat I put it into a variety of devices now actually it worked in most of the phones I was 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 xat formatted 128 GB micro SD card did not work on the xiaomi redmi Note 2 on the ZTE star 2 or on the elone p6000 now what actually 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 xat format and then when I reformat it it actually reformatted it as fat 32 and guess what then it worked and in fact when I took that fat 32 formatted micro SD card and put it into the ZT star 2 and when I put it into the elephone p6000 it worked then as well so basically the pattern built up like this even though the cards are 128 GB even though they're bigger than that 32 GB that's defined by the SD HC standard most phones will actually read them because they have support for X fat and the phones that don't read them because they don't have support for X fat will read them if you format them as fat 32 so what does all this mean well basically actually means that if you do buy a card that's bigger than 32 GB you've got a high chance that it will work in your phone even phones that say they only Support 32 GB but the trick will be to reformat the card as fat 32 well my name is Gary Sims from Android authority I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it the thumbs up please don't forget to subscribe download the Android authority uh app also use the comments below to tell me your experience of using large micro SD cards in your Android phone and most of all don't forget to go to androidauthority.com because we are your source for all things Androidhello 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 flagships have expandable storage the next year they don't the year after 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 Micro SD card support in your phone the question is this 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 cards now the SD Association have currently defined three different types of SD card now when I say SD card I mean micro SD card and normal SD card because there'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 2 gb and that was just called an SD card but we went past the 2 GB limit a long time ago so therefore the association brought out SD HC now SDHC has capacity limits up to 32 GB and that might be a number you've seen somewhere for example a lot of smartphone manufacturers say expandable storage up to 32 GB and that gives us a clue that they support SDHC now after SDHC came the next level which was SDXC now SDXC supports capacities up to 2 terb so technically any smartphone that supports SDXC can support cards up to 2 terab and of course 2 terab cards don't exist today and that's why sometimes when people read that 2 terabytes they say wow 2 terabytes but actually you can't buy a 2 terabyte card so therefore to keep consumer expectations at the reality level some smartphone manufacturers might just say SD card support up to 64 GB or up to 128 GB which are really the current cards that are available at the time and next year they might say up to 256 GB or whatever the cards that are most commonly available then now while the SD Association defines the physical characteristics SS the pins are on the back of the card how the devices 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 Gaby or 64 GB where the file is is it at the beginning is it at the end is it split over several different parts and to you do that it needs what's called a file system now a file system on your Windows PC will probably be something like NT FS on Linux maybe using ext4 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 it actually turns out that the preferred type or file system for uh USB flash drives and for SD cards is fat now there are different types of fat there's fat 16 there's fat 32 there's even fat 12 and fat 8 if you want to know a bit more about fat then please go over and look at the article that accompanies this video over at the androidauthority.com webbsite but the bottom line is this fat 32 is the file system that is basically read by every type of computer in the world including Linux including uh Macs 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 copyrights of that file system are owned 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 actually make quite a lot of money out of Android not because they particularly produce anything for Android although that's changing but because they actually get royalties from some of the big oems now once we hit that 32 GB limit with SD HC what happened then is that people started to look around at how good fat 32 was for bigger and bigger file system now one of the limitations for fat 32 is you can't have a file bigger than 4 GB now I'm recording this video on a Canon camera and my camera when it gets to a file so actually 2 GB on this case but it could be 4 GB on another camera it has to stop the video recording and start recording in a new file because the file's just too big for fat 32 now of course really in the days of HD video 4K video 8K video These file sizes are going to get really big very quickly so the SD Association decided they needed a new file system to replace fat 32 for the SDXC 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 for X fat and because of that there's actually no xat support officially in Linux if you were to boot up let's say a Ubuntu distribution you won't find xat there because it is owned by Microsoft and they don't have the right to use it now of course there are open sources 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 GB or less windows will format it as fat 32 but if it's bigger than 32 GB it will format it as X fat now actually that also applies to for example USB thumb drives flash drives if you put a USB flash drive a 12 8 GB 1 for example into your Windows desktop and you try to format it you cannot format it as fat 32 it will only be formatted as airx fat or as NTFS now it's actually during my testing which we'll get to in a moment I found out it's actually the difference between the support for fat 32 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 GB well that theory is very nice but what does it mean in 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 128 gigabyte USB flash drive and connected it to a variety of Android smartphones using a micro USB to a usb OTG converter cable I also took a 128 GB micro SD card and used 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 fat 32 even though it's 128 GB but the micro SD card came pre-formatted as X fat and in fact I reformatted both cards in the opposite uh file systems to see whether that had any effect so let's start with the my USB uh 128 GB M 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 xat but it was recognized when it was formatted as fat 32 I then took the same USB uh drive and connected it to my Ubuntu laptop and guess what again when it was formatted as X fat it wasn't recognized but it was formatted as fat 32 it was so here we can see from the start that the Linux support for X fat is limited whereas for fat 32 it seems to be okay I then took the mic this USB flash drive and Connect into my Sony television it's got a USB port on it and it can show photos and things like that and again when it was in fat 32 mode it was read by the Sony television but when it was formatted as xat it was not read by the Sony television and then what about Android phones well actually I connected it to a variety of Android phones and when it was formatted as fat 32 it all worked fine I even I connected it to a note 4 to an opo F1 plus to a Zen phone 2 even to an Amazon Kindle Fire and it worked absolutely fine but when it was in xat mode some of those devices weren't able to read it now more interestingly I took the micro SD card which is 128 GB and starting with it formatted as xat I put it into a variety of devices now actually it worked in most of the phones I was 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 xat formatted 128 GB micro SD card did not work on the xiaomi redmi Note 2 on the ZTE star 2 or on the elone p6000 now what actually 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 xat format and then when I reformat it it actually reformatted it as fat 32 and guess what then it worked and in fact when I took that fat 32 formatted micro SD card and put it into the ZT star 2 and when I put it into the elephone p6000 it worked then as well so basically the pattern built up like this even though the cards are 128 GB even though they're bigger than that 32 GB that's defined by the SD HC standard most phones will actually read them because they have support for X fat and the phones that don't read them because they don't have support for X fat will read them if you format them as fat 32 so what does all this mean well basically actually means that if you do buy a card that's bigger than 32 GB you've got a high chance that it will work in your phone even phones that say they only Support 32 GB but the trick will be to reformat the card as fat 32 well my name is Gary Sims from Android authority I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it the thumbs up please don't forget to subscribe download the Android authority uh app also use the comments below to tell me your experience of using large micro SD cards in your Android phone and most of all don't forget to go to androidauthority.com because we are your source for all things Android\n"