Samsung brought the SD card slot back to the Note line — now it's time to reacquaint yourself with it.
Note buyers have spoken: they wanted an SD card slot back in their phone. Samsung listened, and the brought back the card slot just like the did — hiding right in there next to the SD card.
Things mostly pick up right where they left off with the SD card slot on the , though the software and capabilities have changed a bit. If you have a Note 7 or are getting ready to pick one up, these are the things you should know about expanding the storage in your phone.
No 'adoptable storage' option to be found here
Perhaps the biggest thing to note right off the top is that the Galaxy Note 7 doesn't support "Adoptable storage" system as we've seen implemented on other phones. Adoptable storage is an optional system that phone makers can use that lets the SD card be completely consumed by the phone, in effect becoming just another part of the internal storage — this lets the phone freely move apps and files between the SD card and internal storage, but it has some downsides as well.
The Note 7 skips the feature altogether for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being issues with performance, stability and user confusion. That means the SD card in the Note 7 simply acts as a separate, mountable piece of storage that has no special tricks associated with it. You can just load data on it, put it in the phone and the phone will be able to read the files. The phone can also write to the card, but not span data across from the card to the internal storage.
Not every app can be moved to the SD card
One of the downsides of not using Adoptable storage is that you're still dealing with the "old" way of putting apps on your SD card, if you feel the need to. To move apps over to the SD card on your Note 7, you simply go into the settings, find the application settings and go to each app that you want to move. Not every app can be moved to the SD card, though, as some have certain permissions or performance requirements that make them only run from internal storage.
Going a step further, many apps that you think have moved over to the SD card may have only moved part of their assets to the external storage. For example if you install a large game and want to put it on your SD card, you may find that the game has offloaded some of its media assets to the SD card, but kept the core of the game and any additional downloads on the internal storage. Because of this shortcoming you may want to just keep all of your apps locally on the Note 7's internal storage, and just use the SD card for other types of media instead.
Removing your SD card also removes the SIM
This is probably the simplest of tips, but it's important to remember where the SD card lives and what that means for it. The SD card shares a slot with the SIM card tray, meaning that if you want to remove one, you're going to remove the other.
If you remove the SD card to move media back and forth between your phone and computer, that means your SIM just came out of your phone — and chances are you're going to want to reboot when you put the SIM card back inside. On the opposite end of things, if you ever have to remove your SIM card (which won't happen nearly as often), you'll lose access to your media and apps on the SD card until it's replaced and re-mounted in the phone.
Pictures and video save to the card by default
When you put an SD card in your Galaxy Note 7, the phone will start to utilize it right away. And since you can't move all of your apps over to the card, it makes sense to start putting pictures and videos you take there, so that's what the camera does by default. When you first launch the camera app after inserting an SD card you'll see a warning letting you know of the change, and if you don't want photos or videos saved to the SD card it's a simple switch in the camera settings.
If you choose to keep that default setting, you'll notice that the Gallery app creates a separate folder for those images in the "Albums" area of the app, which is separate from any other photos or videos you took before you put the SD card in. The difference is noted by a little SD card logo in the corner of the album, which is a little confusing at first. If you just stick to the "Pictures" tab of the Gallery you won't notice any difference, as all of the photos — SD card or not — will show up in the regular photo timeline.
SD card photos may be odd to handle in third-party apps
There is one notable downside of storing images and videos from the camera on your SD card: the only guaranteed way to delete those files is from the app that created them, which in this case is the default Camera and Gallery apps. If you prefer to use another gallery app, you may not be able to properly move around and delete photos that are stored on the SD card. For example in , and many other popular gallery apps, you'll be able to view and apply extra edits to the photos but you can't delete the original files from within the third-party app.
This becomes particularly bothersome in a cloud-based gallery app like Google Photos where you can delete photos remotely and have those changes sync back to your Galaxy Note 7 — in this case Google Photos will never be able to delete those local files on your phone, you have to do it manually from within Samsung's Gallery app. If you use another simple gallery app without any cloud functions (and using an older permission model or a workaround) it may be able to manage those SD card photos just fine — but it's something to be aware of if you run into odd behavior when deleting.
You probably don't have to worry about performance
External SD card storage will definitely be slower than the internal storage on your phone, but thanks to the overall increase in SD card speeds in the past couple of years this isn't really something to get worried about. Chances are that the only real slowdown in this configuration is the actual connection from the card to the phone, rather than the card itself, and even that isn't that big of a bottleneck.
Most of what you're doing with an SD card is pretty small, relatively slow and consistent movement of data. Taking a few pictures, reading HD video or MP3 audio, or maybe saving some documents. None of these things require a super-fast SD card, and you won't notice any difference in performance when comparing to doing the same functions with internal storage.
Find good deals on SD cards
The biggest reason to not buy an absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel SD card is that you can get really good cards for a great deal all around the internet. Sure a super-fast 200GB card is going to set you back a few extra dollars, but if you just need to add another 64GB of storage you can get a great, name-brand SD card for less than $30 and know you're getting a good product that's going to do everything you need.