What is an effective way to determine how much free space is on the SD card?
If you just want to check it yourself, here are the steps to do it:
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/5641/android-how-to-check-available-internal-and-sd-card-memory-space/
UPDATE:
I just found that there is a better SO answer to this question:
How to Check available space on android device ? on SD card?
Here are some methods to get available space, these methods give you more control and you can get available space in different units bytes, kb, mb, gb.
How to Check available space on android device ? on SD card?
Usable since API level 9:
Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory().getUsableSpace();
http://developer.android.com/reference/java/io/File.html#getUsableSpace()
Here is a function that allows you to retrieve the amount of memory in the android device.
You can very easily find out the amount of memory that is left of you SD card via the phones device information. Please elaborate if your requirements are something else.
Create a file and write one byte at a time until you get an out of space exception.
Related
I am working on an application where I need to detect the sd card id only when the card is present on the device. I have viewed and tried this link and it solves my problem: Android get id of SD Card programmatically
But I didn't understand the exact meaning of mmcblk0 and mmcblk1, although I got that they are volume partitions of the memory.
Is anyone aware of that ? Please help if u know about the concept.
Thanks in advance !!
Here, mmcblk0 is the internal NAND, and mmcblk1 is the external sd card.
I have one simple question. If i have one file in system partition of android and if i copy the same file on sdcard, which will be faster to access?
Please answer this question.
Thanks in advance
The difference will be negligible. In any case, most newer devices have just one storage onboard the device, which is partitioned. In such devices, the need to access a separate SD Card goes away, as the memory is the same as the system storage.
On devices with an SD Card, there may be a very minute delay in accessing the file, but it will be negligible in pretty much any scenario.
You will not be able to really notice the access speed difference between accessing file from internal memory and SD Card.
With internal memory you will get added advantage of a security as it won't be accessible for other applications or you cannot access it by mounting.
The answer is Internal phone memory
because disk management(for phone ) is always better for internal memory as compared to SD card, So it is faster to access internal memory but you will not be able to notice the because difference is in mili seconds
With internal memory you will get advantage like user can't see your file until unless device is not rooted.
As stated, the time difference is not noticeable. However, a simple law of physics (and EE) will tell you that the longer the distance is (in this case the I/O bus), the longer it will take in time. Thus, the SDCard is slower than anything on the motherboard, even though it is measured in miliseconds.
I have found the SDCard is best used for static storage of your media files, and apps should be installed on the phone making them run as fast as possible, even though you can move some apps to the SDCard.
The speed is not noticeable unless you are coping the very large video files. The SD card speed is measured by class like:(Class 4, 6 or 10), the class 10 have higher speed as 10MB/S and class 2 have speed around 2MB/S. So, for good class of SD card, the speed gap is less. However, normally phone memory is faster than the SD card.
I know that there are different classes of SD Cards and I also know, that there are many different kinds of internal storage (eg. my Dell Streak 5 has a 2GB Micro SD Card Class 4 built in).
However, is there a significant increase/decrease of speed if I have an app installed on a SD Card? Or is it the same (if you are not accounting the SD Classes)?
Like Phil say, it depends of a lot of factor.
I add : Your SDCard is a really important factor, you have to check your Read / Write Speed to see if the ratios are good. They depends a lot function the brand, the reference... of your SDcard.
A lot of people say it' s really faster to run on an SDCard.
Exemple here hith the CyanogenMod http://forums.androidcentral.com/barnes-noble-nook-color/85741-cm7-faster-internal-memory-sd-card-boot.html
You have to test function your hardware.
Good luck ;).
It depends.
No really, it does. The only way to be sure is to diagnose this yourself. IMHO I don't think there'll be a significant difference in speed if the circumstances are great. However, there probably are circumstances where the card could be significantly slower.
I wanted to know if there was a size limit to the data files an android app can use or a size limit depending on the SD card (or internal memory) filesystem ?
Cheers
Olivier
The file size limit is determined by the filesystem. FAT32, for instance, cannot handle files larger than 4GB. Unfortunately, it is fairly likely that your microSD card is formatted in FAT32.
For Android 2.2 and older, the internal file system is YAFFS. The author, Charles Manning, states in this mailing that the maximum file size is 512 MB. It has been announced that Android 2.3 will use ext4.
It might be possible to format your SD card to this format as well, but I haven't tried it. Bear in mind that you won't be able to read the contents under Windows or OS X.
See also the answers in this topic.
Android - What is the maximum file size that setMaxFileSize can be set to in respect to Androids mediarecorder? I know it's somewhere between 4147483650 and 5147483650. Why is there a limit in the first place?
I'm recording on to a SDCARD, detecting the size of the cards space before we run.
"ERROR/AuthorDriver(31): setParameter(max-filesize = 7270309850) failed with result -5"
"ERROR/AuthorDriver(31): Ln 903 handleSetParameters("max-filesize=7270309850") error"
"ERROR/AndroidRuntime(409): java.lang.RuntimeException: setMaxFileSize failed."
Why is there a limit in the first
place?
SD cards use the msdos (FAT16) filesystem, which has a file size limit. This is not an Android limitation, but a limitation of SD cards in general.
If you look in AuthorDriver.cpp, you'll see that it performs a check to see if the time value you passed in will fit into a 16bit int. There's a comment that reads "PV API expects this to fit in a uint16". So, yeah, there doesn't appear to be a way to get around this for now.
I have tried on GS5, Hauwei Y550, Note 3 and they all can't record files longer than 4096 MB (even with their official camera application). This limits 1080p videos to 35 minutes and 4K videos to less than 20 minutes. The reason is the one provided by Shane-Kirk (except it is 32bit).
I have opened an enhancement issue on Android source code with all details, if you are interested please consider starring it, the more we are the more likely they will make a patch to AuthorDriver.cpp.
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=145618&q=mediarecorder&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars
I'm working on an android recorder as well.
use StatFs and pass the path of the external storage directory to the constructor and you can call functions such as getAvailableBlocks() and getBlockSize() on the StatFs object.
So that way you know how much more space is available on the SD card.