Help What is the file system of internal SD cards?

[norweger]

If a phone has 16 GB of storage on the internal SD card, is that by default FAT32?

And with a FAT file system you can store both media (images, music, movies) and apps?

But with a EXT4 file system you can only store apps and not media?

 

[Hadron]

There is no unique answer to this, but while some old devices might have used YAFFS, and some use f2fs, most will use ext4.

The one thing you can be sure of is that it won't be fat32 on any modern device using a unified storage model (apps, data and media using the same space). Whether one that keeps the app space separate from media (as they did circa 2011, and some cheap Chinese devices still do) might use fat32 for the media store I don't know. Hacks for limited storage devices which use a partition on the SD card to store app data require an ext partition in my experience.

Remember that in most modern devices the "internal sd card" /sdcard (media) and the /data partition (apps and app data) coexist on the same partition, so will have the same filesystem. That's why a better name for the "internal sd card" is "emulated sd card" IMO, to make it clear that it is not an sd card (which not everyone realises).

 

[norweger]

Thanks. Hmm, if there are advantages with using only EXT4 on a "internal" SD card, default memory, is there any special reason why many use FAT for more than half of the space on external SD cards?

 

[Crashdamage]

FAT32 is left solely for easy compatibility with Windows. While Linux is smart enough to read MS filesystems, Windows is not smart enough to read Linux filesystems. You can add Linux filesystem capability to Windows with 3rd party apps, however.

Or, more accurately, MS refuses to acknowledge that there's anything else besides MS filesystems in use. If it's not MS it just doesn't matter. Call it an attitude problem on MS's part.