A new trick up the sleeves of smartphone manufacturers is to limit the amount of internal storage they provide on their smartphones. The reasons could be many for this—boosting sales of handsets so that more people are forced to upgrade due to additional needed storage, forcing them to store data online for an additional cost and possibly bringing down the cost of manufacturing to boost profits.
However, on the other hand, there are a few genuine reasons to excluding the memory card slot altogether. The internal memory storage is faster due to its direct connectivity with the chipset. The higher performance benefits high speed burst photos, high-definition video recording and increased speeds of loading applications and saving data.
But in today’s world, saving data in the cloud with expensive internet speeds and costly online storage subscriptions is not practical for everyone. Smartphone manufacturers such as Apple, Motorola and a few others have been releasing more and more handsets with limited internal storage and no options for further storage expansion. So where would you store your large files? The internet is the only option you can thin of. However, there are other options where you could store large files, such as on your PC or local network. However, this is impractical since you cannot restrict yourself to being indoors just to access your data. For small files such as music and photos, an online storage, for example DropBox, Google Drive, etc, could be a best recommendation. However, for large videos and other types of data, you will need something cheaper, practical and immediately handy. An iPhone user could possibly afford the costs of storing files online since he would probably be affluent. But that cannot be applied for all.
We recommend investing on an external portable hard drive as your storage medium. Manufacturers such as Seagate, Western Digital, Kingston, Patriot, Apple and a few others have introduced wireless portable hard drives for a while now. These hard drives are nothing but a simple network storage drive with an inbuilt 2.5-inch storage connected to the local network using the wireless protocol.
Shown above is the Kingston Wi-Drive. It is an external storage drive with a built-in wireless hotspot and powered by a rechargeable battery |
The wireless storage drives are battery operated; they run off an internal rechargeable battery. They are compact, highly portable, simple to operate and can store up to 1TB (and more in future) of data. All you need to do is configure the hard drive once to start the internal wireless hotspot, give in an SSID and secure it with a strong password. Then you need to connect the smartphone to this wireless hotspot and use any compatible file browser app to share the contents over the network. The data transferred over the wireless network is immensely faster than the 3G internet you would use; making sure you can even watch a full HD movie with no buffering whatsoever. And best of all, you don’t pay any internet charges. All you need to do is just invest in a wireless hard drive once. A 1TB wireless hard drive should cost you Rs 8,500 onwards. In comparison to a 1TB external portable storage, the difference in cost of the wireless option approximately Rs 5,000, depending on the brand. There are cheaper options with lower capacities also available. Using this method, you can share your data between multiple users, smartphones, tablets and laptops, thus saving the cost of data storage for a whole bunch of devices you own. No more internet charges for each device. iPhone, iPad and other smartphone users can benefit from this option.
Shown above (left) is a wirelss card reader with UTB OTG feature, and on the right is a USB OTG cable connected to the smartphone and a USB pen drive |
If you want a cheaper option, (iPhone and iPad users can stay out of this), Android smartphone and tablet users can plug in your USB pen drive to expand your internal storage up to 64GB for now. The feature needed on your Android device is USB OTG (USB On-The-Go). If your device supports the USB OTG feature, all you need is a USB OTG cable (available online for less than Rs 200), your pen drive and a file browser. Plug in your pen drive and smartphone to either ends of the USB OTG cable and you are set to go. You would not be able to use an external USB hard drive along with the USB OTG cable since an external hard drive would require additional power and your operating system would also not read the storage due to the capacity limitation. You might possibly be able to use a 64GB SSD with the USB OTG cable, but we cannot assure you about the functionality. Instead of a USB pen drive, you could also use a USB memory card reader with a memory card plugged in. Moto G, Moto X and a few others should not worry now as you can use the USB OTG feature to expand the internal storage for a miniscule amount.
