One of the perks of using an Android smartphone is to use a MicroSD card, where it can store additional data for your phone especially photos, videos and more. As the tech person at home, I usually get the call for help when phones are in-trouble and in this particular case…the phone is so slow cause for no obvious reasons.
So I went on investigating on what’s wrong with the phone. The usual questions like is the storage full? Nope, it’s more than 10GB free, is there a malicious app slowing down the phone? Nope, I scanned an anti-virus and even removed unnecessary apps. Mind you that the phone was so slow, it took me more than 15 mins just to close all apps and check the settings.
So what could go wrong? I tried closing all apps and restart the phone, it didn’t do too much. The phone was so slow that it only responds for 3-6 seconds before freezing again, it’s like it only moves or responds when it finishes a task.
When I said to force reset the phone as last resort, it hit me to remove the MicroSD card and sim card to check. After removing both, the phone was responding like a brand new one and had no sign of sluggishness at all.
After inspecting the MicroSD card…it’s fake. I tried inserting it again and an error message that the external storage is slow and should consider removing it. It was an 8GB class 4 MicroSD card for more than 2 years now and it was also fake upon checking the serial.
With new phones today capable of shooting more than 13MP and even shoot 1080p videos as default, then a class 4 micro SD card isn’t suitable anymore. It’s recommended to buy MicroSD cards with Class 10 speeds of higher for better performance, remember that your external storage isn’t as fast as you internal storage.
Lesson learned here is that it is wise to check around your MicroSD card from time to time, you can do diagnostic checks like defrag and check disk if you’re a bit advance via PC. Other countries doesn’t encounter this as they moved on to cloud storage, unfortunately our internet landscape isn’t that ready yet for a full-scale cloud storage for everyone.
So check your phone now, you might think you need a new one but it just take one check of the MicroSD card to see the whole difference.
