Galaxy S7 appears to support greater than 200GB SDXC cards

[Brightglaive]

       While the specs on the fairly newly-released Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge reveal a microSD card slot capable of supporting up to an impressive 200GB microSDXC behemoth of a flash card, Samsung's own website seems to hint that the 256GB microSDXC, Evo Select, Class UHI-3 card is also supported on the S7/S7Edge. See the "*" footnote on the "See More Features" section of the 256GB card at:
http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/memory-storage/MB-MC256DA/AM

 

       The footnote reads, "Test Device: Samsung Galaxy S7. The above results are from internal tests with the average-actual data store capacity (93.1% of the labeled capacity). The results may vary based on testing conditions and host devices.
" This note would indicate that the phone recognizes memory in excess of the 200GB stated limit. 93.1% of 256GB is about 238.4GB

 

         But if we take a deeper dive the 93.1% capacity is easily explained by the differences in Decimal and binary Gigabytes. Storage manufacturers advertised capacity and and the capacity seen by operating systems and how they look at data is the missing 6.9%.  The card is 256,000,000,000 bytes storage capacity. That's 256 Decimal gigabytes. A Decimal Gigabyte is 1000X1000X1000 or 1,000,000,000 bytes.  Operating systems look at storage in binary-gigabytes or Gibibytes. A Gibibyte is 1024X1024X1024 or 1,073,741,824 Bytes. Unfortunately these two terms are often simply abbreviated to GB, which causes panic, confusion and anger when you think, "I didn't get all the storage space the SD card claimed it had!!" But it is there. If we divide 256,000,000,000 by 1,073,741,824 we get 238.418 Gibibytes or about 93.1% the "stated" capacity. The OS is programmed in binary and will see and report capacity in GiBibytes. The storage manufacturer reports the capacity in Decimal Gigabytes to make it look larger and more appealing to the customer. 

 

       In short, the implication is that the phone recognizes the full 256 Gigabytes (AKA 238.418 Gibibytes) ....Freakin' AWESOME!!! 

 

PLEASE NOTE: I haven't personally tested this. I don't have the 256GB microSDXC UHS-I3 card to go in my S7 Edge or the US$199 to buy one. Maybe Linus or Luke may want to give that a try if they still have a functioning Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge. 

[themctipers]

why would a s7 be limited to 200gb? it seems standard that sd card limits are like 64, 128, 256.

[babadoctor]

the real question is why the fuck do you need 256gb of storage on your s7 in the first place

[Brightglaive]

I have no idea. The S7/S7Edge specs say "up to" 200GB Micro SD card.  I only can find 2 options for a 200GB SDcard... both by Samsung.  This could have been a "soft" limit or a "hard" limit at the time and may have changed. Considering the reputable 256 GB cards were barely announced in May of 2016....maybe the limit was only ever out-of-date marketing on the S7/S7Edge. 

[Brightglaive]

My wife takes photos EVERYWHERE. Seems she can't go somewhere without taking a photo or video. She crashed her S5 and S6 with over 1600 photos on her existing SD card.

 

She also takes longer videos with her phone and listens to MP3's and audiobooks. And no, she doesn't want to use a Digital SLR or standalone video camera or MP3 player. I finally had to tell her to offload them to our home server so she could use her phone again.  

 

In this case she could have all her digital photos, videos, MP3's, and audiobooks on ONE card.