How to Mount your SD Card as Permanent Storage for Additional Space

As a thin and light laptop user which typically has 128gb to 256gb of SSD storage I find that too small for my taste and usage, especially when you’re installing a lot of programs, games, and/or syncing your cloud storage offline.

Fortunately, most laptop nowadays has provided slots for SD Cards which in my case was a microSD slot. In this tutorial, I will show how I can use it to expand my storage (it would work the same with a normal sized SD Card but you might want to get the half sized card so it would sit flush on the side of your laptop). Right now, I’m using a 128gb microSD Card from Samsung and I would say it helped a lot to keep my files and workspace organized.

Objective

• Install programs to your SD Card
• Put your cloud storage directory in your SD Card
• Pretty much anything you could normally do in a permanent storage

STEP 1 • Precautions

• Install the latest builds and drivers
  1. Update and install the latest drivers for your Windows
  2. Update your Windows OS

STEP 2 • Reformatting

• Connect SD Card and format to the NTFS file system
  1. Open This PC
  2. Right-click on the SD Card and select Format
  3. Choose NTFS for the File system (Optional) Rename it with the Volume Label, e.g. EXT
  4. Click on Quick Format checkbox

STEP 3 • Mounting

• Create a mount point
  1. Open This PC
  2. Right-click on the C: drive
  3. Create a new folder and name it the same as your SD Card, e.g. EXT
• Mount SD Card
  1. Press the WinKey + R and type in diskmgmt.msc
  2. Right-click on SD Card and select Change Drive Letters and Path
  3. Click Add, select Mount in the following empty NTFS folder and click Browse
  4. Browse your previously created folder in C: drive
  5. Click OK