When asking about how to increase memory on android, you probably meant how to free memory on android. Many do not yet know that on any modern device, there is a short-term memory (short-term RAM) and a long-term memory (ROM) on which your data is stored. And those who ask about how to increase RAM on android most likely do not understand this.

RAM on a tablet or smartphone cannot be increased, it can only be cleared of programs that are on this moment are not used. A more difficult problem is the lack of space in the long-term memory (ROM), when your smartphone screams at you about the lack of disk space and you can not install any more programs.

And this happens because when buying, we save money and buy budget models, where all resources are scarce. In the store, such a smartphone works very cheerfully, but then, when you load it with your programs, this trouble begins with a lack of memory and you start typing in Yandex - help, how to increase internal memory on android?

So the first advice is to buy normal smartphones, it is better to pay an extra thousand rubles and then save a LOT of nerves! By the way, as I noticed, it is very profitable to buy in M-Video:

I myself compared recently when I wanted to buy a laptop, at the moment M-Video and Ulmart are still the best best stores by price.

How to increase memory on Android?

There are several ways to solve the problem, I will start with the simplest and end with the most effective.

Remove unnecessary / unused programs. It's trite, but even that doesn't reach everyone. Delete unnecessary programs and the place will be free!

Install cleaning program. There are a lot of such programs, I advise you to install 360 Security Lite, there is an antivirus, a RAM cleaner and a garbage cleaner. Unlike others, this is light application, created for phones with RAM less than 1 gigabyte.

The program is made with high quality, it is made by the same Chinese that they did, which I myself use on Windows and recommend to everyone.

But this does not always help either, because after removing the garbage, it instantly accumulates again, and these cleaner programs themselves sometimes weigh a lot. Therefore, we proceed to more radical methods.

Removing updates. Your smartphone must have automatic software updates enabled. There are programs that just need to be updated, for example, . Most programs, especially those that you do not use, are best not to update. When updating, they download a lot of megabytes and clog the memory on the phone. What should be done?

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If your device does not have enough internal memory, Can use SD card as internal storage for your android phone. This feature, called Adoptable Storage, allows the Android OS to format an external storage medium as persistent internal storage. The information on the installed SD-card is encrypted and cannot be further used on another device.

An SD Card is a very convenient option for storing photos, songs, and videos. Even if you have a large amount of internal memory on your Android smartphone, you can always need a large chunk of memory to store long videos, taken by the camera high definition your phone.

It's important to know

There is one drawback, the SD chip may lag behind when recording high-definition video.

Android by default in the internal memory and only occasionally uploads data to the SD card. Thus, you are deprived of installing any additional applications, if your phone is running out of internal storage, for example, if budget devices on Android One.

What is storage storage?

Storage storage is the main memory of your smartphone, but if necessary, it can be expanded using an SD card. This on Android it's called Adoptable Storage. This will allow you to use a removable microSD card installed on Android phone, as the main storage. Thus, you can easily solve the problem of how to make the SD card the main memory on Android and overcome the lack of space if the phone has a small internal volume.

Features of using the card as the main storage

There are a number of some important features that should be considered in this procedure.

Will be useful

When using a drive, be it an SD flash drive or a USB drive, it is important to remember what format the device is in and whether it supports it. operating system android rather basic file formats there are four types: FAT32 or exFAT, ext4 or f2fs.

How to change phone memory to android memory card? The question is not entirely correct, it is impossible to completely replace, you can only "increase" additional volume, as it were.

Using your SD-card as the main storage can be a great solution for music lovers and TV series lovers on the way to work or on a long trip. But, as is often the case, memory expansion always rests on the cost of the required device, because they differ both in speed and volume, as well as in the adaptable function of storing information. Here are some of the nuances that you can consider with different parties- both negative and positive.

  • SD cards are slow. This is the painful reality of today's tiny memory chips. Even though they can store tons of data, they are slower than phone storage and have limited quantity read-write cycles.
  • It's important to know

    Using SD cards as permanent storage will require more frequent read/write operations, which will degrade its performance over time, and in the worst case, may lead to complete data loss. It will be especially disappointing if there are important documents or expensive photos or unique videos.

    Before swapping your phone's memory for a memory card, your Android will perform a performance test on the SD card to make sure it's fast enough to meet the specifications for use as a main storage.

  • Irrevocable integration into the operating system. Using the Adoptable Storage function, operating android system encrypts the external SD card used as internal storage, so it is tied to a specific device, without the possibility of further use on another smartphone. The key used to encrypt the data on the SD card is stored in the main memory android devices. Thus, it is not possible to dismantle the received storage on another phone due to its encrypted nature of the data (you can remove the card, but it will not be detected on the other phone).
  • However, you can remove the external removable storage from your device and return it back to simple flash drive mode. The device will remember which are on this card in order to restore the settings when received device will be connected later. So you can also use another storage device.

    It's important to know

    Always make sure that you do not remove the default SD card during the unmount procedure, otherwise the media may be damaged.

  • Not all programs can be installed. In practice, Android can install almost all applications on the internal storage. However, this also depends on the consent of the application developer. He has the right to enable or disable the support of the accepted storage in the application by adding the appropriate attributes to the code of the downloaded program.

How to use SD card as internal storage on Android?

How to replace internal memory phone to external sd card on android? Configuring your SD card to work as internal storage on Android is actually a fairly simple process. There is nothing complicated about this and you will see for yourself further.

It is possible that the Adoptable Storage function is not supported by your device, even if the smartphone is running under Android control 6.0 and higher (this happens, it all depends on the model and brand of the smartphone). The device manufacturer may have disabled this function. However, there are command line methods that allow you to force the use of a flash drive for data storage.

The basic formatting steps are listed below.


On the next screen, you have one last chance to decide for yourself if you want to change your mind.

This instruction is devoted to restoring the state of the memory card, or rather, creating one partition instead of several, created, for example, in the way described in the article or in some other way.

Windows OS already contains a built-in tool for managing partitions on memory devices - diskpart so, fortunately, you don't have to install anything. The program does not have GUI, all commands must be run from a command prompt with administrator rights.

Working with DiskPart

First of all, connect the memory card to the computer via a card reader. If necessary, use the adapter supplied with the memory card.

Click "Start" and find among the programs " Command line" right click and select the "Run as administrator" option.

In the window that appears, enter the command diskpart, a prompt will appear in the window DISKPART> entering commands from the DiskPart console utility.

Enter command list disk and press Enter to see a list of all drives (internal and external) connected to the computer.

Guess where it is HDD, and where is the memory card, you can, if you look at the size of the memory of storage devices.

As you can see from the example, the hard drive is labeled "Disk 0" and the memory card is labeled "Disk 1".

Enter command select diskX(where X is the number of the memory card in the list) and press the key Enter to let the program continue to work with the memory card (my memory card is labeled "Disk 1", so I enter the command select disk 1).

Execute the command clean to delete all partitions on the memory card. Attention! All data will be deleted from the memory card!

To create a new partition, run the command create partition primary. This command will create one partition for the entire memory card.

Execute the command select partition 1 to select the newly created partition.

Execute the command active in order for the system to mark the partition as active.

Complete full formatting memory cards using the command format fs=FAT32(or NTFS to be able to record files larger than 4 GB, in which case the SD card may not be readable by other devices). The operation may take a long time depending on the size of the SD card. If there is no time to wait, run the command with the parameter QUICK(that is format fs=FAT32 QUICK) to perform a quick format.

To assign a letter to the memory card, run the command assign. Immediately after executing this command, an autorun window will appear, as when connecting a removable device to the computer.

End the DiskPart program by executing the command exit.

Execute the command exit again to close the command prompt window.

As you can see in the program, after performing the above operations, the memory card again contains only one partition.

The problem of lack of memory is one of the fundamental problems for both PCs and mobile devices. With a small amount of free memory, the system usually starts to slow down, freeze, work unstably and unreliably. This is especially true for Android devices, many of which initially have a rather small amount of main memory (the so-called "Internal Storage"). In such a situation, some users may have the idea to try using an external SD card as the main storage on their Android device. In this article, I will tell you how to make an SD card the main memory on Android gadgets, and what methods will help us with this.

We analyze how to make an SD card the main memory on Android

To accomplish this task, you will need a high-speed SD card (preferably class 10 or faster). Cards 6, and especially 4 and 2 classes are not suitable for such purposes, your system will significantly slow down its work due to their use, which is unlikely to please any of the users.

It is also important to understand that the validity period of such an SD card, due to the active load on it, will be significantly less than if the card was loaded in standard mode.


Method number 1. Change the contents of the Vold.fstab file

The first of the described methods involves changing the contents of the file system settings Vol.fstab. After making these changes, the Android OS will consider your SD card as the internal memory of the device, while keeping in mind that a number of previously installed applications may stop working.

It is important to know that this method only works on rooted devices running Android OS below (!) than version 4.4.2. In Android OS versions 4.4.2 and above, most likely you simply will not find the specified file.

Also note that an implementation error this method(in particular, adding extra characters to the necessary lines) can most sadly affect the performance of your device. Therefore, carefully weigh the possible risks, and if, nevertheless, you have made a decision, then proceed with its implementation.

So, to implement this method, do the following:

For example, these lines could be:

  • dev_mount sdcard/storage/sdcard0 [email protected]
  • dev_mount sdcard2/storage/sdcard1 auto/xxxxxx

To make the necessary changes, we need to change the path in the specified lines, that is, in other words, instead of 0, put one in the first line, and in the second, put 0 instead of 1.

After the changes, these lines will look like:

  • dev_mount sdcard/storage/sdcard1 [email protected]
  • dev_mount sdcard2/storage/sdcard0 auto/xxxxx

Save your changes and then reboot your gadget.

Another option on how to make a memory card the main one on android:


Method number 2. We use the settings of Android OS 6.0 and higher

In addition to the first method, in which I looked at how to switch the phone's memory to a memory card, there is another method that works only on Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) or higher OS settings and allows you to use the SD card as the main one for saving files and working with them . To implement it, I recommend making a copy of the data from your SD card (if any), since this map will be formatted by the system.

Starting with androil 6.0, it became possible to use a flash card as internal storage device data. Now the device, after certain actions, can use the memory available on SD as freely as the internal one. The article will talk about how to connect an SD card in this capacity and what restrictions are imposed on it.

How to connect a flash drive as internal memory

Before connecting the drive, you must transfer from it all important information. During the setup process, it will be completely cleared and you will not be able to return the data.

First of all, you need to go to Settings and then go to the " Storage and drive”, where you should click on the SD card.

Next, choose " Tune» and click « Inner memory". Immediately after that, the device will warn the user that all information will be deleted and it will become unreadable on other devices without full formatting.

Here you need to select the item " Clean and Format” and wait for the memory cleaning process to complete. You may then see a message that the media is running slowly. As a rule, this means that the flash drive used is not very good quality and its use as device storage can also affect the performance of the smartphone itself. For good and fast work recommended to use UHS Speed ​​Class 3 (U3) drives.

After formatting is completed, the smartphone will require you to transfer the information, you should agree with this and wait for the work to complete. After the transfer, the work of turning the flash drive into internal memory will be almost completed, all that remains is to reboot the device.

Features and limitations of using an SD card

There are a few things to be aware of before using a flash drive in this way.

  1. After conversion, all data, except for some applications and system updates, will be placed on the SD drive.
  2. When connected to a computer, only this part of the memory will also be available for interaction.

In fact, all actions are performed only with a flash drive, the real internal storage of the phone not available for interaction and, practically, is not used in any way. Firstly, this means that when you remove the drive, almost all data, photos and applications will be lost. Secondly, if the volume of the flash drive is less than the actual storage capacity of the smartphone, then the amount of available memory will decrease, not increase.

Format the card with ADB for use as internal storage

On some devices, the function is not available, but it is possible to connect a USB flash drive as storage in another way. However, it should be noted that this method is very laborious and can harm the device, therefore, if you are not confident in your abilities, then it is better not to do this on your own.

To use this method, you will need to perform a lot of actions. You need to download from the site and install Android SDK, then download and install from the official website device drivers, and you also need to enable " debug mode byUSB» on the device.

  • adb shell
  • sm list-disks (after execution, the id will be given in the form disk:XXX,XX it should be written down and entered in the next line)
  • sm partition disk:XXX,XX private

Then it will take turn off the phone, go to settings and click on sd, select menu and click " Transfer data". Everything, on this action is completed.

How to put a memory card in standard mode

To return the flash drive to standard mode, you just need to go to its settings, as in the first option, and select " Portable media". Before that, all important information should be transferred to another location, because the drive will be formatted in the process.