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> On Android one can easily mount the storage as a USB drive and transfer data at high speeds. One can? I thought one actually can't, because a) the internal

> On Android one can easily mount the storage as a USB drive and transfer data at high speeds. One can? I thought one actually can't, because a) the internal storage is using a file system Windows PCs and Macs don't understand and b) you can't simultaneously mount the internal storage on both your phone and your computer because that would only lead to data corruption. And unmounting the internal storage while the phone is running isn't possible either, because that's were all your apps and settings and whatnot are stored. Hence for a very long time now you can only access your phone via MTP, which can be annoyingly fickle and less stable. Conversely, an external SD card that only gets used as additional storage space for documents, music, pictures, etc., actually can be unmounted and at least in principle be switched into true mass storage mode (although in practice this might require root, and I don't know how well this still works on current phone models that still feature SD card slots).

vel0city 3y ago
You're using an extremely narrow definition of "mount" here, as in natively mounting the filesystem. Accessing your phone via MTP is still a form of "mounting" the storage over USB. Different than how one would mount an SD card, sure, but its still "mounting" the storage. I've had no problems over several years using my Android device as essentially a large external storage device to move files around. For the purpose of copying photos, videos, documents, other files, side loading apps, etc. it works well. And one can go the other way and take an external drive and plug it in to most Android devices these days to copy data off of it without having to use it with a Windows/Mac/Linux device. So from the perspective of someone who went on a vacation in the woods and is shooting hundreds of gigs of videos it is possible to plug in external storage and copy off to it directly. One could even use a USB SD card reader and write it to SD cards. Or MMC cards. Or floppy disks if you're so inclined.
- iggldiggl 3y ago
  > I've had no problems over several years using my Android device as essentially a large external storage device to move files around. For the purpose of copying photos, videos, documents, other files, side loading apps, etc. it works well. Yeah it works, but I'd still say that "well" only applies with some caveats. MTP only works with full computers, not other devices that only expect some dumb USB storage (like the book scanner at my local state library), for a long time there was a bug whereby Android didn't preserve the last modified date when copying files via MTP (and I'm still not absolutely sure it's been fixed in current Android versions – I guess I'm going to find out once I finally upgrade my phone), sometimes it didn't show changes I made on my phone if the media scanner hadn't got around to indexing them yet, normal software on my computer other than the file explorer couldn't directly access files, listing of directories was slow, if you tried to do too much at once (like continuing to browse the storage while some large file transfer was underway) you'd get the dreaded "device is busy" error… it's better than nothing and it's not completely unusable, but there's a reason why I immediately looked for better solutions

vel0city 3y ago

You're using an extremely narrow definition of "mount" here, as in natively mounting the filesystem. Accessing your phone via MTP is still a form of "mounting" the storage over USB. Different than how one would mount an SD card, sure, but its still "mounting" the storage. I've had no problems over several years using my Android device as essentially a large external storage device to move files around. For the purpose of copying photos, videos, documents, other files, side loading apps, etc. it works well. And one can go the other way and take an external drive and plug it in to most Android devices these days to copy data off of it without having to use it with a Windows/Mac/Linux device. So from the perspective of someone who went on a vacation in the woods and is shooting hundreds of gigs of videos it is possible to plug in external storage and copy off to it directly. One could even use a USB SD card reader and write it to SD cards. Or MMC cards. Or floppy disks if you're so inclined.

iggldiggl 3y ago
> I've had no problems over several years using my Android device as essentially a large external storage device to move files around. For the purpose of copying photos, videos, documents, other files, side loading apps, etc. it works well. Yeah it works, but I'd still say that "well" only applies with some caveats. MTP only works with full computers, not other devices that only expect some dumb USB storage (like the book scanner at my local state library), for a long time there was a bug whereby Android didn't preserve the last modified date when copying files via MTP (and I'm still not absolutely sure it's been fixed in current Android versions – I guess I'm going to find out once I finally upgrade my phone), sometimes it didn't show changes I made on my phone if the media scanner hadn't got around to indexing them yet, normal software on my computer other than the file explorer couldn't directly access files, listing of directories was slow, if you tried to do too much at once (like continuing to browse the storage while some large file transfer was underway) you'd get the dreaded "device is busy" error… it's better than nothing and it's not completely unusable, but there's a reason why I immediately looked for better solutions