Best answer: We recommend picking up a 128GB or 200GB microSD card to handle your Fire Tablet media storage needs.
- Best bang for the buck: SanDisk 200GB microSD Card ($27 at Amazon)
Why do you need a microSD card at all?
Amazon’s popular line of Fire Tablets are beloved because they provide a great entertainment device for a low price, but one of the reasons for that low price is a low amount of included internal storage. In years past, Fire tablets have shipped with as little as 8GB of storage, which is practically nothing. As it currently stands, the lowest option available on a modern Fire tablet is 16GB, which is better than in previous years, but still not great (especially if you want to download lots of media content).
True, you can pay more to get a 32GB or even 64GB variant, but that may not always be the best (or most affordable) option for everyone. Just going from the 32GB to the 64GB on the Fire HD 10 can run you as much as $40 more.
What takes up all that space?
As you may be aware, Fire tablets run Amazon’s FireOS, which is a forked version of Android that does not include the Google Play Store, apps, or services. That being said, Amazon’s own AppStore offers a ton of content consumption options, including many (if not most) of the streaming video, music, and games that you might want to download.
When you’re considering what size of internal storage you want to get in your Fire tablet, or how much expandable storage you might need, consider the size of some of these popular games:
- Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse – 592MB
- Goat Simulator – 505.8MB
- Terraria – 123.1MB
- Minecraft – 93.3MB
And this is only for four games. Most popular streaming video apps like Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ allow you to download content for offline viewing (some require a subscription to do this), as do music apps like Amazon Music, Spotify, and Tidal.
It doesn’t take long to realize that onboard storage won’t go very far, especially when you start adding your favorite movies, shows, and music. It’s better to gamble on getting more storage than to have to keep removing and re-downloading your favorite content when you want to play, watch, or listen offline. Depending on what type of media (and how much) you want to carry on your Fire tablet (be that games, movies, music, photos, etc), it might be a good idea, and a money-saving idea, to pick up a microSD card.
What size should you get?
So long as Amazon allows you to add memory in the form of a microSD card, then we generally recommend getting a 16GB or 32GB Fire tablet and then picking up the largest microSD card that is supported and that you can afford. Luckily you can get a lot of gigabytes these days for relatively little.
The memory capacity in the latest round of Fire tablets can be expanded up to 512GB, so we recommend picking up at least 128GB or even 200GB microSD card for the best balance of price to storage. Right now you can get a 200GB microSD card for under $30 at Amazon, which is $10 cheaper than going from 32GB to 64GB of included storage on the latest Fire HD 10.
Store more, for less
SanDisk 200GB Ultra Micro SDXC UHS-I Memory Card
$27 at Amazon
Get all the memory you need
Snag this Class 10 A1 microSD card for under $30 from Amazon. It offers read speeds up to 100MB/s and comes with a 10-year limited warranty.
