Give your Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge adoptable storage without Samsung’s help

So people are still smarting from this move by Samsung – the Korean giant has announced that it will be deactivating “adoptable storage” on the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, an inherent feature of Android Marshmallow. Samsung says that there will be no such feature in the version of TouchWiz on its new flagships, as it has the danger of erasing the user’s data, and is – according to the Korean gadget giant – confusing for consumers. Well, here’s an idea for you.

You can actually use adoptable storage by going through the process manually, using commands through the Android Debug Bridge (adb). This process was shared to the public by the people at modaco.com, and is guaranteed working as of today. It will require you to have and do a couple of things first – that you have a PC with adb installed, that you enable usb debugging on your phone (Settings > About Phone > tap build number multiple times > Developer options > enable debugging), and you have a fast and empty microSD card. On the latter, Class 10 speed and above should work, and you better backup all its contents to the PC. And no, rooting is not required (yay!).

The process will have you do some terminal commands on the computer, which is basically to say if you want to adopt the whole microSD storage to internal storage, or if you want to keep a percentage for external storage, which is also doable. For instance, one a 128GB microSD card, yuou may want to commit 50 percent of that to internal storage (a more than 50GB bump to your internal storage will help you a lot), and 50 percent as standard external microSD. See the full instructions at the source link below, and don’t forget to follow the instructions as precisely as you can. WARNING: the process will format your microSD, so again, make sure you have backed up your data out of there.

You see, Samsung may have conveniently made the decision for its users that adoptable storage is a bad idea, but that’s not completely true either. It can be bad for users who get confused easily – and Samsung may have just admitted that their user base have a lot of these. But adoptable storage is also a big help for power users who know what they’re doing. So, here you go.

SOURCE: Modaco.com