Develop Bugs

FroYo + ADB App2SD: Goodbye, Kingston microSDHC?

Good eveneing dear community
I realize that FroYo was a major leap forward for quite a few of us, especially those limited in phone storage (I'm talking about Nexus One and Desire owners in particular). However, I think there is something seriously wrong with those App2SD capabilities.
I recently got the impression that moving applications to SD storage is killing SD cards too fast. Just after the first official FroYo OTA, I discovered and used the posibility to force move applications to SD storage using ADB shell. The result was that virtually any application could be moved out of the phone's internal storage. So far, so good.
But considering that we get updates from the market every few hours, SD cards are under much more pressure now than they were designed to, aren't they? I'm saying this, because in the exact same configuration I mentioned above, my cards keep dying. Before the OTA, I bought an expensive class 10 Kingston microSDHC card and the performance was indeed remarkable. However, after the OTA and my ADB stunt, my card would get mounted as read-only every few days now. In addition to that, I can't run any applications on the card anymore and the entire system becomes unstable. Unmounting the card using the Android system settings is not possible and neither is formatting. Instead, my phone would sometimes reboot. At first I thought this was a problem with my Kingston SD.
When I ran some tests and did the same things with the official 4 GB card that shipped with my phone as well as with another 8 GB card that came with an older Nokia phone of mine I realized that it wasn't a problem specific to my Kingston card. All of them showed the exact same behavior. This is not just annoying, it also causes data loss, which in my case is unnacceptable!
Has anybody experienced the same? Is this a problem of Android 2.2 or is it just the way microSDHC works? What, besides mounting said damaged cards in a Laptop in attempt fix, can we do about it?
Thank you for any suggestions.
My next phone must have at least 8 GB of internal storage...

Define "dying".
If by dying you mean Android reports there's something wrong with your card, then more likely the problem is software-related rather than the SD being overused.
I got the "your card is fubar" message from my phone but it was as a result of me damaging the file system with a sketchy file manager app. I put it in my computer, did a scandisk. This found the problem, fixed it, I put it back in my phone, voila, perfect again.
Or your problem might be related to the method you're forcibly moving the apps to your SD card. Since you're doing it with ADB rather than through the operating system itself, it's possible apps are corrupting your card's file system as a result of not realizing where they're located. Just a guess.
In any case, SD cards don't (and won't) die from the sort of use you're describing. What might be harmful is storing frequently-used cache on your SD card, but that's not something that you're doing.
Keep in mind that SD cards are intended to be used in cameras, camcorders, etc, and these things write a lot more frequently and aggressively to the card than a little app storage here and there.
I'm not exactly an expert but I'm definitely what I'd call an enthusiast, and let me tell you with certainty: you really have nothing to worry about. Your problem is most likely a software (or related file system issue) or else caused by a one-in-a-thousand random hardware defect. Android, or more specifically, app to SD, isn't a problem.
Maybe you've heard of solid state drives for computers, these are becoming more common. I use one in fact. They operate using technology similar to SD card storage and if ANYTHING was going to stress these things, it would be running a whole computer off them, temp files and all.
Finally, if you're still a little afraid, let me remind you that in fact your phone itself uses the same kind of flash storage as an SD card. Every phone, MP3 player, and similar device does. So in a sense, if wearing out your storage is a concern for you, isn't it better to wear out a replaceable SD card than your phone's irreplaceable internal storage?
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So now assuming you trust me that there's nothing to worry about, I would suggest you stop forcibly moving apps to your SD card as a possible long-term solution. If you stop getting card problems, you know what the problem was. Since this means you'll run low on storage, I'd then suggest you install a custom OS that allows you to force-move apps from within Android itself, such as Cyanogenmod.

I've been using this mod since it came out and have had no problems. As mentioned above it must be software related to your phone.
Sent from my HTC Desire

Thank you so much for calming me down. I just got the impression that my cards are toast. However, as long as there is a possibility to fix this using my laptop, I'm on the good side.
I disabled that ADB stunt, let's look what the next few days bring.

Just an idea: if your phone (or the sd slot, for that matter) would be somehow messed up, wouldn't that show the same symptoms? It would even explain why _every_ card acts that way. Maybe it's a bad contact in the slot, who knows...

8gb tablet only showing 5gb avail whiped

I don't know when this happened but my tablet is missing more then 3gb of avail memory (only shows 5.45gb total space which can't be right) Only thing i can remember that gave me the most trouble was trying to get ubuntu to work on the side with android using this http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=987740 only to find it was getting all sort of errors with the repositories so i ended up deleting it but still i know that seeing a few hundred meg to a gig is normal but a lil over 3gigs missing entirely something gotta be wrong x.x
Anyhelp out there since can't connect this to my mintbox netbook so i could check the partitions an make sure nothing is abnormal

Its totally normal, its what the Android team introduced with Honeycomb, universal storage, all 8GB a100s show 5 or so due to Android system etc.
Sent from my Nexus S using xda premium

well i feel like a dork now :x I have a captivate that has ICS on it an it shows 1.83gb used for internal an the remaining 13gb on the internal (16gb cappy) But sheesh lot of memory being used x.x

Ya just how it is. Thats why I have a 32gb sdcard in there for my videos and music. I leave the 5.45gb for apps only. And if I have games that require mass amount of data to be downloaded then I use GL to SD app so it stores those game data to sdcard. Root is required to use GL to SD though. With this setup I havent had the need to delete apps or even bloatware. I'm sure I have over 100 apps in mine.
rooting
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1487142
GL to SD
https://market.android.com/details?...t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5zbGYuTGlzdGdsQXBwIl0.
Theres also a mod to make your SDcard as your internal. So basically the 5.45gb will act like an external drive while your SDcard will be your internal memory. But if you go this route might be good to have class4 card or higher.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1422158

I've been using the sd swapped since i got my tablet downgraded back to HC with ICS I was ending up using to much of internal storage with game data an other content.

pintek said:
I've been using the sd swapped since i got my tablet downgraded back to HC with ICS I was ending up using to much of internal storage with game data an other content.
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I hear ya man thats why I'm still on HC till we get perm root. I have tried the SD swap but my 32 gb is almost full already so after I was all done I was left with about 2gb space. About the same if I just went with GL to SD so wasnt really worth going through all the trouble doing the sd swap. Plus I remove my SD card constantly so for my rom to be ran from it wouldn't be a good idea for me.

My 32 GB SD card is on its way, I never thought too much about music etc on my tablet seeing as my phone has 16 GB but now that I practically live with my tab, Daddy needs more space baby
Sent from my Nexus S using xda premium

[Q] Any fix for system instability after moving too many apps to SD card?

I have seen several conflicting threads on this, but no clear solution. Basically, the problem I have is that if I move more than 50 or so apps to my SD card (I have heard others complain about the problem manifesting at around 70 apps) a race condition occurs during the card scan, which since it doesn't complete before a timeout, causes the phone to soft reset (basically reload just the top level OS above the continuously running kernel). These resets then continue to occur at semi-random intervals, such as every time you try to access the memory card. So far, the only fix I have is to delete apps from the SD card, and it really doesn't matter which ones they are, only that above a certain number, the system becomes unstable, and I presume it is because the system cannot index all of the apps fast enough. I can't believe the stupid Samsung engineers never thought of fixing this.
Anyway, I am running a stock, rooted kernel, stock ROM, but the internal memory is nearly full with all of the large applications that for whatever reason cannot be moved to SD. Does anybody have any viable options?
I have heard of some people using app2SD. I have heard of others remapping their external storage to sd_card with the USB storage mapped to sd_card/external_sd. I tried replacing my memory card (Sandisk, 16GB, Class 2) with a brand new, out of box (Sandisk, 16GB, Class 6), and I am still limited to the same number of installed apps. I'm not sure, but I think the number of active widgets on the desktop may also be a contributing factor (all of my widgets are stored to internal memory).

I have about 180 apps on my phone and have never run out of room; what do you have on there that takes up so much space?
if its data, then move that to an external sd...

wase4711 said:
I have about 180 apps on my phone and have never run out of room; what do you have on there that takes up so much space?
if its data, then move that to an external sd...
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Click to collapse
Well, first of all, I've never removed the Sprint bloatware. I also have the Amazon App store and (on the assumption that my SD card still has gigabytes of storage) pretty indiscriminantly "purchase" and install Amazon's free app of the day, plus all the other apps I've gotten from Google Play. By latest count, it is around 360 apps, and that was after I deleted several large apps that for some horrible reason couldn't be moved to the SD card, including PoolBar (50MB+), Android Phrase Book (26 MB+), some other tennis game I got from Amazon (20+MB), none of which gave you the option of offloaded to SD. About 110 of the apps were games, 25 utilities, 24 media apps, 20 social networking apps, 19 shopping apps, 17 travel apps, 16 PIM apps, 11 photo manipulation tools, 11 internet apps, 8 maps and navigation, etc.
Complicating matters, Android has a /data/data directory which has soft links to all the applications installed on your system, regardless of whether they are installed on internal or external memory, and each link must be the filesystem minimum 4KBs each. Looking at root explorer, I see that this directory alone is over 300MBs of internal storage.

well, the answer to your problem is easy; get rid of 1/2 the **** on your phone that you never use, and you will be fine!
if you don't use it every day or at least once a week, its gotta go

jatoghia said:
Well, first of all, I've never removed the Sprint bloatware. I also have the Amazon App store and (on the assumption that my SD card still has gigabytes of storage) pretty indiscriminantly "purchase" and install Amazon's free app of the day, plus all the other apps I've gotten from Google Play. By latest count, it is around 360 apps, and that was after I deleted several large apps that for some horrible reason couldn't be moved to the SD card, including PoolBar (50MB+), Android Phrase Book (26 MB+), some other tennis game I got from Amazon (20+MB), none of which gave you the option of offloaded to SD. About 110 of the apps were games, 25 utilities, 24 media apps, 20 social networking apps, 19 shopping apps, 17 travel apps, 16 PIM apps, 11 photo manipulation tools, 11 internet apps, 8 maps and navigation, etc.
Complicating matters, Android has a /data/data directory which has soft links to all the applications installed on your system, regardless of whether they are installed on internal or external memory, and each link must be the filesystem minimum 4KBs each. Looking at root explorer, I see that this directory alone is over 300MBs of internal storage.
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Click to collapse
I can't imagine ever installing that many apps, but whatever... If it we me, I would start by trimming off anything you "know" you have never or will never use. After that I would concentrate on putting the biggest apps on the SD card and the rest on the internal. I have 122 apps installed on internal only with much room to spare and I am sure there are things I just will never use. LOL

CyberpodS2 said:
I can't imagine ever installing that many apps, but whatever... If it we me, I would start by trimming off anything you "know" you have never or will never use. After that I would concentrate on putting the biggest apps on the SD card and the rest on the internal. I have 122 apps installed on internal only with much room to spare and I am sure there are things I just will never use. LOL
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Click to collapse
It really isn't hard to use a bunch of apps, particularly with all the websites, including this one, that have their own viewer apps (or Wikipedia, urban dictionary, etc.). Anyway, I have all my apps in folders so it still only requires 2 pages of apps. I think it is stupid that they designed the operating system so that you would be app limited, even with an unlimited amount of storage via the sd card slot. I hope this is one feature they fixed in ICS. A much better strategy for exploiting the multilevel memory architecture would have been to allow the user to install ALL nonessential apps to the SD card by default, eliminating the need for soft links in internal storage, and then use the internal storage as a nonvolatile app cache with an LRU replacement policy. This would then give the most commonly used apps the performance benefit of running from internal storage without the user having to go moving crap around. It would actually be very similar to what Intel is now doing with solid-state drives as a hard disk cache with the new Z68 chipset.

[Q] Install To SD Card

Hey
I just bought a new HTC One V and i want apps to be installed on my sd card and i cant(there is a very low percentage of apps that can what should i do??)My phone is not rooted and i am not willing to root it too.Please help me out

Are you running out of storage for apps? It should be totally unnecessary to do this. You have 1GB of space to use. Storing apps to the SD card only slows them down.

@CafeKampuchia: really i didn't know that but i want to shift apps to sd card so that the phone is fast

Then don't move them. Moving apps to the SD card may have made older devices faster, but not this one. It's got plenty of fast memory for apps.
I suggest you leave apps on the device unless you're running out of memory, which basically isn't going to happen until you spend a couple hours randomly downloading large apps from Google Play.

Did they downgrade multi-window in kitkat?

It says they only let 2 multi-windows now.... DIdn't before you could do 3 or 4?
Before that I could do as much multi-windows as I wanted? Why did they make this change? Is this a downgrade?
Or am I just imaging things? Was it always 2.
Also, Polaris Office 5 sucks it has so many glitches (document not supported, but it opens manually, doesn't free draw save for ppt, etc.) . I want the polaris office that was included in the original note 10.1.
Also, wtf google Why did you take the external SD card away...
There was a reason why I bought the 16 gb ones.

It was always 2 from the factory. You can root and enable 4 though.

Hahahalalala said:
Also, wtf google Why did you take the external SD card away...
There was a reason why I bought the 16 gb ones.
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Click to collapse
So you use the cloud... Google wants to own your info, not just allow you access to it....
The bullsh!t line about security is ridiculous...

The cloud is not the answer. Download and upload speeds, data charges, file sizes and security issues. Just a few concerns. I use cloud storage and am in the process of reducing it. Trust Google? Hell, that is akin to demanding you trust the government. You cannot.
Via my Note 3

BclingergFJ said:
The cloud is not the answer. Download and upload speeds, data charges, file sizes and security issues. Just a few concerns. I use cloud storage and am in the process of reducing it. Trust Google? Hell, that is akin to demanding you trust the government. You cannot.
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Click to collapse
I agree about the cloud not being the answer. I also agree that taking away a feature people relied on, even made purchasing decisions based on (16GB vs.32GB), for no truthfully explainable reason, is pretty crappy. But it's time to move on. The hobbling of external storage first came to light last December when the SGS4 GPe received 4.4.2. That's six months ago. Since then, nothing's changed. People's choices are:
Leave Android for another OS out of contempt for Google
Stay on 4.3 forever
Root and install a fix
Adjust the way you use the external SD card and come up with new ways to do things
Trade your 16GB devices for one with more storage
***** endlessly to strangers on discussion forums about how crappy Google's decision was and how your life has been ruined
Even with six months having passed, every day, on every forum I view, there's another new thread started about "why can't I save to external SD?" It's getting kind of old. So people need to pick one of the above and move on. And those choosing option 6, no one here can help you and answers to any and all questions you might ask have been posted dozens of times. F'd up external storage is Google's "new normal" and they aren't going to back down.
P.S. - I chose option 4

we can stop 16g android device and finally we have 32g or more.
Sent from my SM-G900S using XDA Free mobile app

hochui said:
we can stop 16g android device and finally we have 32g or more.
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Click to collapse
Someone should tell Samsung.
This really isn't the catastrophe it's being made out to be. Video, games, and pics take up the most storage space. They can be stored and played off the external SD card. Most large apps allow you to move them to external SD too. All Samsung's apps (Video, Music, Gallery, My Files, Samsung Link) have universal access to external storage and can be used to manipulate files saved there. Any app can create its own sandbox on external SD and save/edit/delete files there. What's been lost is every app having access to everything on external storage. It's a pain in the a_s but there are work-arounds that aren't that onerous and most people, especially consumption users, will be fine.

4. root and SDfix
The only acceptable solution is to root and run SDfix from playstore.
I was forced to do that after kitkat OTA upgrade on my Note3 and external SD write was crippled overnight.
My Note10 is still on 4.3 rooted, but when I go 4.4, root+SDfix will be first on the list right after the upgrade.

BarryH_GEG said:
I agree about the cloud not being the answer. I also agree that taking away a feature people relied on, even made purchasing decisions based on (16GB vs.32GB), for no truthfully explainable reason, is pretty crappy. But it's time to move on. The hobbling of external storage first came to light last December when the SGS4 GPe received 4.4.2. That's six months ago. Since then, nothing's changed. People's choices are:
Leave Android for another OS out of contempt for Google
Stay on 4.3 forever
Root and install a fix
Adjust the way you use the external SD card and come up with new ways to do things
Trade your 16GB devices for one with more storage
***** endlessly to strangers on discussion forums about how crappy Google's decision was and how your life has been ruined
Even with six months having passed, every day, on every forum I view, there's another new thread started about "why can't I save to external SD?" It's getting kind of old. So people need to pick one of the above and move on. And those choosing option 6, no one here can help you and answers to any and all questions you might ask have been posted dozens of times. F'd up external storage is Google's "new normal" and they aren't going to back down.
P.S. - I chose option 4
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I pick 6... :silly:
Seriously though, the sdfix doesn't fix everything unfortunately but its the best option right now.
And just so we're absolutely clear, GOOGLE SUX!!!!!!