Using phone as 512GB Game Drive - WE FAILED
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,683 words · ~8 min read
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this is some generic ass looking packaging right here
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uh but anyway we reached out to the brand
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integral because they have the highest
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capacity micro sd card on the market then
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it arrived and we looked at it and we went
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what are we even gonna do with this why do you even need a
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512 gig micro sd card and then
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the answer hit me what if you could use it
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to turn your phone into an external game drive with your
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whole steam collection on it let's give it a shot shall we
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off at the link below
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so to ensure that we have a decent experience maybe not even a great
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experience but a decent one there are three things that we're gonna want
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before we get started number one is a phone with a micro sd slot the
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iphone 10 and the oneplus 6
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have no expansion whatsoever i mean that's always been true for apple
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and then the alcatel 3v so it's a budget phone with very little on-board storage
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so it makes sense it would be expandable the galaxy s9 and the blackberry key2
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all do have microsd slots
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then step 2 is that we need to make sure
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that the phone supports fast enough data transfer speeds that you're going to be
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able to load up a game in a reasonable amount of time so that already
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eliminates the alcatel 3v because that right there is a micro b usb 2 slot it's
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going to be super slow finally
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because usb type c is kind of a wild
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west or like a pirate code type of
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standard where you know it's more guidelines we're
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going to have to actually verify that the port on here even transfers data at
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usb 3 speeds so for a 1.65 gig file
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that's looking pretty good it looks like we are getting usb 3 speeds so either of
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these phones is a candidate except
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for one little trick if you go and you have a look at the
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full spec list for them you can see here that tcl who produces phones under the
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blackberry brand now is only actually certifying the card
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slot for up to 256 gig micro sd cards because for all
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intents and purposes 512 gig cards don't
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really exist yet like integral is not
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the kind of brand that typically finds
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its way onto a qualified vendor list
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with all of that said samsung does apparently say yes in fact the slot
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will support up to 512 gig cards now as
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long as they use the same microsd standard the odds are it'll work in both
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but this card right here actually costs
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about 300 british pounds to buy
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so it's okay it was just it was just the
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adapter so this is not an insignificant purchase
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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
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of places where you can buy it before we go any further i just want to plug it
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into a regular reader make sure it's working and also do a quick speed test
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here so they don't give detailed specs other than saying that it's a class 10
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card microsdxc 1v10
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and then they say up to 80 megabytes per second
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then if you read the fine print transfer speed write speed lower
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okay that's definitely lower
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oh that's a lot lower i can see why they
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don't want to put that in their specs but they probably should because that
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would be good to know when you have 512 gigs of storage that it's going to take
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you a very long time
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to fill it up 18 megabytes a second sounds a lot better than one gig per
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minute but it turns out they're actually about the same so it would take you like
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nine hours to fill this thing up from empty
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let's have a look at read speeds well that's not bad
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that's well in excess of our spec unless it's using a cached version in
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RAM somewhere that's still sitting there in order to transfer this so i think
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it's actually possible that this sd card is not cooperating perfectly with my
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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
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so it pops up right away tap here to transfer media files bippity boppity
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all good
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perfect okay
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so everything's going actually exactly according to plan now
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all we've got to do is fire up steam
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and install some games library folder
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okay did not see that one coming assign
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drive letter to a smartphone so
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after about half an hour i may have a solution
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so there's a class of applications so there's a couple here that i tried i
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tried one called web dav server and i tried another one called dav drive and
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webdav server has the ability
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to reconfigure it to a different home directory so i have chosen the external
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sd card directory then what you do is you start the server and it gives you
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an http address that's using uh like a local ip
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okay then you get yourself a web webdav client
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on the pc so this guy is called netdrive3 i've got
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a trial of it you go ahead and you configure
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your storage type which is web dav
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then you go mount as i s local drive whatever letter
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you want mount on boot
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uh writable on the fly uploading an explorer and you select a
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path uh right yes you click connect
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that's a good sign 472 gigs free okay supposed to be here
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that's a good sign too let's try to put a file in it i haven't
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gotten this far oh
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we've got right access let's find out what the speeds are oh
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wow it's slow
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one and a half megabytes a second i have
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an idea though i haven't actually tried this in a very
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long time like not since otg was
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sort of the way you do things because we're clearly not using the usb
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connection you can see here we're using wi-fi i just disconnected it but phones
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do support Ethernet theoretically Ethernet
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bloop and bloop
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yes i know all right let's get a new ip in there
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177.
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okay theoretically that's up now let's go ahead and do another
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file transfer test that is
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significantly less brutal tastic
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and improving and unproving
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and okay now we're getting pretty oh
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come on all right in the meantime
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uh let's go ahead and try to add it as a library folder
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h drive new folder steam library
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select
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we might be in luck here
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literally hasn't loaded yet literally lets me click agree
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allocating disk space i'm guessing that's not going to be that fast so i
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finally brought in an outside consultant who had the brilliant idea of uh what
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was it hard linking so yeah
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documents so steamy should go to steamy
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in the phone it doesn't and it doesn't
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and then my web dav server ran into
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apparently a fairly well documented issue where it was having problems with
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files over a certain size so it would allocate the space for the game but then
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wouldn't actually be able to transfer them leading me to the what was to many of
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you probably fairly obvious conclusion that this just isn't a very good idea
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and or a realistic use case for a large
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micro sd card and if you really wanted to carry around
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your game library on a micro sd card you would probably be better off just
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plugging it into a micro sd reader like a normal human being
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so you'll just have to copy files to it
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which will take a long time so there you have
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it it's 512 gigs it's the size of your
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fingernail and we're not 100 sure what to do with it but maybe you guys can
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come up with ideas let us know in the comments below
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