Notes on how to transfer large music and movie files to an Amazon Kindle Fire HD 10 microSD card

These are some very brief notes on what I just did to get a 500GB microSD card to work with an Amazon Kindle Fire 10, so that I can store some very large files on that microSD card inside the Kindle Fire 10. The notes are cryptic, but hopefully they’ll make sense to me in the future, and may make sense to you as well.

Then I rebooted the tablet. When it restarted:

  • I chose the option to format the card as additional internal storage
    • At the time of this writing, if you choose the other more flexible option, the Fire will format the card using the old 1980s-style MS-DOS FAT filesystem, which has a lot of limitations, especially when dealing with large files
    • Hopefully in the future the Fire will support more filesystems, but that’s how it works today
  • After doing this, I connected the Fire to my Mac/macOS system
  • After doing this, scroll down from the top of your Kindle Fire screen to see the system drop-down menu
  • On that menu, tap the “USB”-related notification
  • I don’t have mine plugged in right now, but you need to tap whatever the option is named that allows data transfer (this is a hugely important step)

Next, go back to your Mac (or PC). Here you’ll need to install the Android File Transfer app, if you haven’t installed that already. Once that’s installed, start it up, and then you should have (a) one Android File Transfer window open, and (b) a macOS Finder window open. In the Android window, move to whatever directory you want to work in, such as the Movies or Music directories. Then drag the files you want to transfer from the Mac Finder over to the Android window.

At the time of this writing I don’t see any way to get directly to the microSD card, so what I did was:

  • Follow those previous steps
  • Go into the Settings app on the Kindle Fire 10
  • Choose whatever the option is called to move data from internal storage onto the microSD card

This seems to move all data to the external microSD card, but again, at the time of this writing I don’t see any other options.

Once you do this the first time, it appears that the Movies directory in the Android File Transfer app always points to the microSD card. (In Unix parlence, it seems like Amazon creates a symbolic link from the internal storage to the SD card.)

Discussion

Once you get through the initial setup process, the drag-and-drop stuff between the macOS Finder and the Android File Transfer app seems to be consistent. The hard parts to this recipe seem to be:

  • Knowing that you need to enable the file transfer in the USB notification on the Fire Kindle; nothing about that is obvious
  • Knowing what it means to transfer files from the Kindle Fire internal storage to the microSD card
  • Knowing that once you set this up, it seems to transfer all future files to the external storage

In summary, those are the steps I remember taking so that I can transfer and use large audio and video files with a microSD card, a Kindle Fire HD 10, and a Mac. If you need to do something like this on your own Mac or PC, I hope these brief notes are helpful.