Buying an SSD for your Android phone isn’t as silly as it sounds—here’s how I use mine

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Memory card slots on flagship phones are a thing of the past and are unlikely to return. So if you want extra storage on your phone, your main option is to choose a higher capacity when you first buy it. But I go a different way. I still buy the base model, and then expand the storage by plugging in an external SSD. It might sound strange, but it actually works pretty well.

Why adding an SSD to your phone makes sense

It looks weird, but it works

Attaching an SSD to a phone is a much cheaper way of expanding your storage than the alternatives. Buying a device with a higher built-in storage capacity can get pretty expensive, with the danger that you end up paying for more than you actually need. It’s better than a flash drive, too, in pretty much every way. It’s cheaper, available in much higher capacities, and is likely to be faster and more reliable.

It does add a little bulk and can get warm with heavy use. But on the whole, it’s actually a lot less cumbersome than you might imagine.

My setup, a 2.5-inch SSD in an external enclosure, is pretty comfortable to hold, since it isn’t overly different in either size or shape from my smartphone. I don’t bother fixing it in place; I just hold it against the back of the phone, and it fits in the hand nicely. It’s better than having a rigid flash drive jutting out the bottom, or even a smaller but less conveniently shaped M.2 drive.

External storage comes with benefits over internal storage. First, you can decide how much you need, and change and adapt over the years that you own your phone (and continue using it even after you buy a new phone). And you can share it with other devices.

I’m an Android user with a Mac, which isn’t the easiest combination, but my external drive makes it work well. I’ve partitioned the SSD so that some of it is formatted with APFS for Mac-specific…

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