Expanding SD Cards for Dummies

The Guts of an SD card

Here at the Antisocial Network, we realize that people ask how-to questions for many different reasons. The most obvious is that they need to do whatever; but a close second is that they've heard something is possible, and want to see if it's really true. If they ask their questions in the wrong places, though, they're not always going to get the right answers. Today's DotD not only provides a wrong answer, but manages a twofer: in attempting to answer the question "How to Increase the Size of an SD Card,"¹ eHow.com's Seth Amery managed to answer the wrong question and give the wrong answer. What a champ! [note: moved to Techwalla, still as stupid]

As is normal for eHow contributors, Seth (who claims game expertise, so we know [he thinks] he's a geek) opens with some extraneous information about the development of flash memory storage, although he is pretty vague about it all. He next informs his readers that

"When you run low on space... [the] only way to increase the size of free space left on your SD card is by deleting some files." Which, if you spend even a little time googling the question, isn't necessarily true. But we'll get to that later. Seth then burns up about 90 more words telling his readers how to delete files off an SD card: no kidding! 90 words! And in the process, he includes this halfwit instruction: "Click and drag files you want to save to the new folder if you want to save them. Once you have completed saving the files you want to keep, you can safely delete those from your SD card..." Don't you think a self-described expert on computer gaming would know the difference between MOVE files and COPY files? We did and that's one reason why we're here. but on to the "later"...

There was at one time (perhaps five years back?) a persistent rumor on the internet that you could double (or better) the storage space available on your SD or micro SD cards by altering the filesystem storage mode (typically FAT32 for flash drives). Unfortunately, the vast majority of tutorials and discussions appear to have been written by the apocryphal million monkeys pounding on a million keyboards, so this is hard to verify... In reality, it appears that all this "trick" does is change minimum file size, allowing you to store a lot of small files without wasting (as much) space. When you come right down to it, the only way to increase storage space significantly is to buy a new SD card -- which, given the decreasing costs of memory, is probably no big deal.

Regardless, Seth proved to be a great deal less tech-savvy than he pretends to be. Come on, d00d -- learn the difference between COPY and MOVE, will ya? Until you do, Seth, you'll continue to be a go-to guy for the Dumbass of the Day award. We mean, you've already picked up one, and we're sure you can keep going...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_7207985_increase-size-sd-card.html

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