MicroSD Card as Adoptable Storage: Measurement, Evaluation and Impact

Nowadays, Android based Smartphones are very popular in market because of its user friendliness features, which attracts from young to older generation. In addition, ever increasing demand for storage in Smartphones is resulting into release of smartphones with huge internal memory that can accommodate plethora of Apps and data, but this storage is not certainly enough. However, same Smartphones support external storage up to some GBs and recent Smartphones with high performance NAND technology for an affordable price is playing a big role in market for storing user up to 1TB. Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) and above provides a great opportunity to the user to convert microSD card memory (External Storage) into internal memory (Portable Storage) by converting it to either EXT4 or F2FS and this converted storage is called as Adoptable Storage. Based on popular mobile application use case workloads to which microSD card was subjected, study shows that lifetime of different manufacture microSD card is impacted. Secondly, this study has captured that performance also gets impacted drastically during some specific user case scenarios. After converting microSD card memory into Adoptable storage, microSD card will work as internal storage, enabling user to download Android Apps directly into converted microSD storage. This paper gives insights about Workload on microSD card as target along with details on impact of it on lifetime and Performance of microSD card. Different category of mobile apps like Business, Shopping, Social, Education, Game, News, Entertainment, and communication, etc., which will directly install into microSD card was tested for 4-5Hrs per day (Idle for 19-20Hrs) for 30 days, this is average use time of any smartphone.