this is some generic ass looking packaging right here
uh but anyway we reached out to the brand
integral because they have the highest
capacity micro sd card on the market then
it arrived and we looked at it and we went
what are we even gonna do with this why do you even need a
512 gig micro sd card and then
the answer hit me what if you could use it
to turn your phone into an external game drive with your
whole steam collection on it let's give it a shot shall we
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so to ensure that we have a decent experience maybe not even a great
experience but a decent one there are three things that we're gonna want
before we get started number one is a phone with a micro sd slot the
iphone 10 and the oneplus 6
have no expansion whatsoever i mean that's always been true for apple
and then the alcatel 3v so it's a budget phone with very little on-board storage
so it makes sense it would be expandable the galaxy s9 and the blackberry key2
all do have microsd slots
then step 2 is that we need to make sure
that the phone supports fast enough data transfer speeds that you're going to be
able to load up a game in a reasonable amount of time so that already
eliminates the alcatel 3v because that right there is a micro b usb 2 slot it's
going to be super slow finally
because usb type c is kind of a wild
west or like a pirate code type of
standard where you know it's more guidelines we're
going to have to actually verify that the port on here even transfers data at
usb 3 speeds so for a 1.65 gig file
that's looking pretty good it looks like we are getting usb 3 speeds so either of
these phones is a candidate except
for one little trick if you go and you have a look at the
full spec list for them you can see here that tcl who produces phones under the
blackberry brand now is only actually certifying the card
slot for up to 256 gig micro sd cards because for all
intents and purposes 512 gig cards don't
really exist yet like integral is not
the kind of brand that typically finds
its way onto a qualified vendor list
with all of that said samsung does apparently say yes in fact the slot
will support up to 512 gig cards now as
long as they use the same microsd standard the odds are it'll work in both
but this card right here actually costs
about 300 british pounds to buy
so it's okay it was just it was just the
adapter so this is not an insignificant purchase
and it's not the kind of thing that you can just to try out in the store and then return it there aren't a whole lot
of places where you can buy it before we go any further i just want to plug it
into a regular reader make sure it's working and also do a quick speed test
here so they don't give detailed specs other than saying that it's a class 10
card microsdxc 1v10
and then they say up to 80 megabytes per second
then if you read the fine print transfer speed write speed lower
okay that's definitely lower
oh that's a lot lower i can see why they
don't want to put that in their specs but they probably should because that
would be good to know when you have 512 gigs of storage that it's going to take
you a very long time
to fill it up 18 megabytes a second sounds a lot better than one gig per
minute but it turns out they're actually about the same so it would take you like
nine hours to fill this thing up from empty
let's have a look at read speeds well that's not bad
that's well in excess of our spec unless it's using a cached version in
RAM somewhere that's still sitting there in order to transfer this so i think
it's actually possible that this sd card is not cooperating perfectly with my
reader here so what we're going to do is we're going to throw it into the blackberry key too and see what happens
so it pops up right away tap here to transfer media files bippity boppity
all good
perfect okay
so everything's going actually exactly according to plan now
all we've got to do is fire up steam
and install some games library folder
okay did not see that one coming assign
drive letter to a smartphone so
after about half an hour i may have a solution
so there's a class of applications so there's a couple here that i tried i
tried one called web dav server and i tried another one called dav drive and
webdav server has the ability
to reconfigure it to a different home directory so i have chosen the external
sd card directory then what you do is you start the server and it gives you
an http address that's using uh like a local ip
okay then you get yourself a web webdav client
on the pc so this guy is called netdrive3 i've got
a trial of it you go ahead and you configure
your storage type which is web dav
then you go mount as i s local drive whatever letter
you want mount on boot
uh writable on the fly uploading an explorer and you select a
path uh right yes you click connect
that's a good sign 472 gigs free okay supposed to be here
that's a good sign too let's try to put a file in it i haven't
gotten this far oh
we've got right access let's find out what the speeds are oh
wow it's slow
one and a half megabytes a second i have
an idea though i haven't actually tried this in a very
long time like not since otg was
sort of the way you do things because we're clearly not using the usb
connection you can see here we're using wi-fi i just disconnected it but phones
do support Ethernet theoretically Ethernet
bloop and bloop
yes i know all right let's get a new ip in there
177.
okay theoretically that's up now let's go ahead and do another
file transfer test that is
significantly less brutal tastic
and improving and unproving
and okay now we're getting pretty oh
come on all right in the meantime
uh let's go ahead and try to add it as a library folder
h drive new folder steam library
select
we might be in luck here
literally hasn't loaded yet literally lets me click agree
allocating disk space i'm guessing that's not going to be that fast so i
finally brought in an outside consultant who had the brilliant idea of uh what
was it hard linking so yeah
documents so steamy should go to steamy
in the phone it doesn't and it doesn't
and then my web dav server ran into
apparently a fairly well documented issue where it was having problems with
files over a certain size so it would allocate the space for the game but then
wouldn't actually be able to transfer them leading me to the what was to many of
you probably fairly obvious conclusion that this just isn't a very good idea
and or a realistic use case for a large
micro sd card and if you really wanted to carry around
your game library on a micro sd card you would probably be better off just
plugging it into a micro sd reader like a normal human being
so you'll just have to copy files to it
which will take a long time so there you have
it it's 512 gigs it's the size of your
fingernail and we're not 100 sure what to do with it but maybe you guys can
come up with ideas let us know in the comments below
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