Does the Samsung Galaxy S23 have a microSD card slot?
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Does the Samsung Galaxy S23 have a microSD card slot?
1TB of built-in storage is great, but did Samsung give it expandable storage?
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: No microSD for you
🙅 Samsung Galaxy S23 doesn’t have a microSD card slot – sorry, everyone
📦 Extra storage can still be added with a USB-C flash drive
⚡️ USB-C flash drives are speedier than microSD
It was never likely that the Samsung Galaxy S23 storage would be expandable with a microSD card slot, and now that the phone is here, indeed, there is no space for such a slot on the sleek aluminum-sided phone’s exterior. While the Samsung Galaxy S23 comes with so much built-in storage it hardly matters – as long as you can pony up the cash – being able to buy a cheaper phone and add your own storage is a woefully-missing relic of a bygone era.
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USB-C to the rescue
That doesn’t mean you can’t add storage, though. In fact, you can pick up a simple flash drive to add faster-than-microSD storage to your Galaxy S23 Ultra, and wouldn’t you know it? Samsung is even willing to sell you its own USB type C flash drive. The Galaxy S23 Ultra vs. the iPhone 14 Pro Max is a better bet, then, if you like expandable storage – Apple’s phone, frustratingly, still hasn’t adopted the USB-C connection standard, limiting external storage to a few lightning-based thumb drives.
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On the plus side, USB-C flash drives are capable of much higher throughput than a microSD card slot – even the fastest SD cards max out at 90MB/s, while Samsung’s thumb drive can hit as much as 400MB/s, while others, like the 1,000MB/s Kingston DataTraveler Max (though it should be noted that, unless the Galaxy S23 phones have a USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 or higher slots, you’ll still max out at 625MB/s – we don’t know which standard Galaxy S23 phones support).
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It’s an extra thing to lose, of course, but if you’re the type to regularly swap microSD cards in and out of your gear, you’ve probably figured out a system for that and never lose tiny bits of storage, right? Right?