# Fire HD-8: micro SD?



## HappyGuy (Nov 3, 2008)

The 8-inch Fire HD advertises that you can use an additional micro SD card for additional storage. Does anyone know if the Fire OS is built to easily access this additional storage? It's my understanding that a couple of iterations ago Android cut off direct access to external SD cards without using a third party app. I wonder if Amazon has made the Fire OS capable of properly using an external card?


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

HappyGuy said:


> The 8-inch Fire HD advertises that you can use an additional micro SD card for additional storage. Does anyone know if the Fire OS is built to easily access this additional storage? It's my understanding that a couple of iterations ago Android cut off direct access to external SD cards without using a third party app. I wonder if Amazon has made the Fire OS capable of properly using an external card?


Since the Fire OS is Amazon's own flavor of Android, if they're advertising that you can use it, I would expect the OS to allow it.

Here's a fairly recent article about using an SD card with a Fire:

http://www.howtogeek.com/233492/everything-you-need-to-know-about-using-a-microsd-card-with-your-amazon-fire-tablet/

Betsy


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

There's also this book, $0.99 or free with KU:



Betsy


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## Andra (Nov 19, 2008)

ES File Explorer is pretty awesome, not just because it's a file manager, but because you can use it to clean up after apps that don't uninstall everything.  We've used it since we started using Androids.  And since it's available in the Amazon App Store it's easy to find and install.
I would still max out the onboard memory on the tablet so you have rooms for apps since a lot of them run better when installed in onboard memory.  I keep mostly music and movies on my SD cards and swap them out when needed since they have gotten really inexpensive.


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## Eltanin Publishing (Mar 24, 2011)

I have an SD card in my Fire HD 8, and in the settings, I have it set to save whatever it can there, and I make sure my apps are saved there. But my onboard memory is still pretty full. There apparently are a lot of things that just can't go on the SD card. For instance, all the apps that come pre-installed aren't listed in the settings where I can choose to move them to the SD card. And the operating system... I'm a little disappointed that onboard storage space is an issue. I bought the Fire with the smaller onboard storage because I mistakenly thought it wouldn't be an issue if I had an SD card.

As an example, one game that I have, it says 747 MB total:
app on device: 37 MB
app on SD card: 659 MB
Data on Device: 50 MB
Data on SD card: 1 MB

So even though I told it to save the app to the card, there's still some stuff in the onboard memory.


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## Mike D. aka jmiked (Oct 28, 2008)

After owning four Android phones and an Android tablet, my experiences led me to decide that in the future I will purchase the largest built-in memory I could afford and not count on storing anything in the microSD card.


Mike


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