Surely, from time to time you have had to do a deep cleaning on your smartphone to get a little more internal space. Although before moving to the memory partition on any Android device , the truth is that you have to know a series of terms that, at some point, could help us to carry out this step.
Therefore, you will need to have some idea about storage partitions before taking action. In addition, it is one of the options that users who have rooted their mobile device work with on many occasions. However, the method that we will show you will not be necessary to tell. For this reason, we will explain to you which are the memory partitions that all Android have and how to increase the internal space of your smartphone.
What are Android storage partitions?
Today, every mobile device with the Android operating system has an internal space. This memory is the one that fixes how much space there is in each terminal so that we can use it freely, either to save images, videos or download different applications.
Therefore, it is common to see that among the specifications of each phone there is a certain internal storage that can vary between 64, 128, 256 or 512 GB. Although this can be increased if you have an external card or even a pendrive. And after knowing this, it must also be clear that all Android storage is divided into different partitions. There are a total of six parts that we will look at later and explain what exactly they consist of.
This is why all users who have a mobile device will see how the internal space of their smartphone is limited and does not literally correspond to the numerical figure that the manufacturers give. Fortunately, it can always be expanded in a way that does not require any kind of root .
All memory partitions on a mobile
In every smartphone that has the Android operating system, we find up to six internal storage partitions: / boot, / system, / recovery, / data, / cache and / misc. And, each of these handles a different type of files. Although, fortunately, this memory can be expanded. However, there is a point against it, and that is that it cannot be increased from the internal space itself , but will have to be thanks to external storage, as we will see later. Among them we can find the following references: / sdcard and / sd-ext.
As in this case we are interested in external storage, it is time to know in detail what it is about:
- / sdcard : This controls the space used for all kinds of files. For those of you who don’t know, SD cards work differently than internal memory. This means that, if you decide to delete them, you will lose the data that you have not previously saved, but you can continue using it. On some smartphones you can find other partitions: / sdcard, / sd or / sdcard2. Although, they are basically the same
- / sd-ext : this is the reference to the world of Custom ROMs. And it is that we are facing an equivalent to the / data partition for MicroSD cards when we install a certain ROM in the external storage. Therefore, this will be useful in mobile devices with little internal memory, since it allows to create more space to play with new systems. Even if it gets to the point of deleting it, we would be like deleting the / data partition.
Increase space by partitioning your mobile memory
At present, it is not yet possible to perform this action in the internal space of a smartphone itself, although it can be carried out externally. That is, in this way we can partition a part of a card or external memory in order to increase the internal storage of your mobile device . With this we will achieve that, in the event that we are running out of space, we can gain an extra space without having to lose the benefits of having an external card.
For this, we will have to have a computer to use a series of ADB commands that we will explain to you. Before continuing, we recommend that you make a backup copy of the card that you are going to use, as all the data it has inside will be lost. After this, you will have to perform the following steps:
- First of all, you must have USB debugging activated on your Android device and ADB installed on your computer.
- Then, go on to format the microSD card that you are going to use from your Android or PC.
- After performing these three actions, you will have to connect your phone to the PC with a USB cable and accept USB debugging when the notification appears.
- Then, it will be time to open a command window from the ADB folder itself. To do this, we will have to write CMD in the address bar of this folder and press Enter. Next, put the command: adb shell .
- Now it is time to type the following command: sm list-disks adoptable.
- After this, you will have to copy the number that appears after “disk:”, which will be practically the Disk ID. So it will vary on each mobile device.
- Finally, partition the SD card you have chosen with this command: sm partition disk: <here put the number of your Disk ID> mixed <the% of external memory you want to establish>.
If after a while you want to revert the changes you have made, you will be able to remove said partition in the simplest way . You will only have to carry out the following steps: go to Settings> Storage> SD card and click on the option that allows you to format this element. In this way, we will delete said partition. Of course, make sure you do not have anything in your storage, since all data will be lost.
Can another type of external storage be used?
You can also choose another alternative if in your case you do not have a MicroSD. Therefore, if you have a pendrive or hard drive connected to your mobile device, you can also partition it to convert it into your smartphone’s internal space with the command “sm set-force-adoptable on”, again following the same steps as above. we have explained previously within the ADB.