Five Reasons to Stop Putting MicroSD Card Into Your Smartphone

Entry-level smartphones now have at least 64GB of internal storage, while high-end ones can have 1TB of storage. This makes using MicroSD cards less relevant, depending on your level of usage. If your smartphone is fairly new and with sizable internal storage, it is now possible to not use a MicroSD card at all, here are some reasons why: 

Possible permanent failure

MicroSD card won’t last forever, because it has limited read-and-write cycles, especially if your card is sold by a no-name brand. Each time you read or write a file, especially a large one, your card’s lifespan will decrease. If you buy a new smartphone and reuse the MicroSD card from the previous phone, you may not know its remaining lifespan. It could be useful for one more year or much sooner than that. If you don’t have a backup, there’s a possibility that you will lose your data for good. 

Migrating can be difficult

It is now a common practice to store files in a cloud platform, instead of locally in internal storage or a MicroSD card. If you rely on a MicroSD card as the primary storage media, things can be more complicated than expected. If your previous smartphone has a good security standard, it may encrypt the MicroSD, rendering it unusable when transferred to a different device. So, when you insert the MicroSD card, there’s a risk that it won’t be readable. You will need an intermediary device, such as a laptop as transition storage.

Poor gaming experience

It is now common for mobile games to store gigabytes of files in the phone’s storage. Because MicroSD card has inferior read and writes performance compared to internal storage, this will lead to long loading time and stuttering as new data are constantly fetched from the storage. Installing lightweight casual games on a MicroSD card may have negligible impacts on performance, but it’s a different matter with resource-heavy ones.

Slow loading and transfer speed

You may quickly realize that opening an app on the MicroSD card is slower than opening one from internal storage. The disparity in performance level is more apparent if you have a cheaper card with a slow transfer speed. Back when smartphones only had less than 32GB of internal storage, it is common to transfer app installations to a MicroSD card. If you do need a MicroSD card, make sure that it’s a Class 10 card and that you only use it for storing files, instead of for installing apps. 

More difficult file management

It’s much simpler to use only internal storage in your smartphone. Adding a MicroSD card can complicate things because Android will see internal storage and MicroSD card as a single storage entity. It will be cumbersome to find a file at a given time, because you may not know where a recently downloaded or saved file is stored. The more files you save or download, the more the fragmentation issue can be serious. If you are busy and have limited time, this may hinder your productivity.