Expand Internal Storage On 4K Firestick with a USB Drive

If you want to increase the storage on your Amazon 4K Firestick (Any Fire Device that support OTG), then follow the steps below

Tools Needed

Connect the OTG to your device and plug in your USB drive.

Connect the OTG cable

  • Go to settings —– My Fire TV —- Developer Options and ensure ADB debugging is on
  • Go to settings —– My Fire TV —- about — Network and make a note of your Firestick IP address
  • We now need to make an ADB connection to the above IP address.
  • Install Remote ADB from here
  • Open Remote ADB and enter in the IP address of your device
  • Ensure the port is set to 5555 and click on Connect
  • You will see a prompt asking you to accept the ADB connection. Select the option to “Always allow from this computer” and click Yes
  • We now need to enter in a command to show the attached disks, so enter in this command:
    sm list-disks
  • You will get an output like this:
We can see the Disk ID for my USB Drive is 8,0
  • We now need to enter a command to format this USB Drive. There are 2 options to do this (NOTE – BOTH OPTIONS WILL WIPE THE CONTENTS OF THE USB DRIVE).
    • Option 1 – Format the entire drive as internal storage. This means all of the space can be used to install APKs. However, if you plug this drive in to your computer, you will not be able to use any of the space on there.
    • Option 2 – Format a portion of the USB drive as internal storage and leave the rest for normal use. E.g on a 32GB USB drive, if you format 50% as Internal storage, you will have 16GB to store and run APK’s and if you plug this USB drive in to your computer, you will have 16GB of storage you can use.
  • Here is the command to format the entire drive as Internal Storage:
    sm partition disk:8,0 private
    (note I am using 8,0 as that was my disk ID, your might be different)
  • Here is the command to format 50% of your USB drive as Internal Storage
    sm partition disk:8,0 mixed 50
Entering in the command to format

Whichever command you run, you may see a prompt on the screen saying that the USB drive has been unplugged but a few seconds later you will see the notification that something has been plugged back in

Notification showing something has been removed
Notification showing something has been plugged back in

At this point, any new application you install now will automatically be installed to your USB drive. The apps that have been installed to USB will have this icon next to them:

Icon showing which APPS are Installed to USB

If you want to move applications that are already installed to your internal storage to your USB drive then follow the steps below:

  • Inside ADB we need to find the package name of the installed application you want to move. Let’s say you want to move Kodi, here is the command to search for installed packages that contain the name Kodi
    pm list-packages | grep kodi
  • You will get the result
    org.xbmc.kodi
  • Now that we have the package name, we now need to find the volume name of our USB drive. To do that, enter in this command:
    mount | grep expand
The bit in yellow is the volume ID of our USB drive
  • Now that we have the volume ID, the command to move your package is
    pm move-package org.xbmc.kodi 2a21d33e-6771-446c-b952-d0cb376ff549
    (note: the above is my volume ID, yours will be different so ensure you use the correct one.
  • You will then see a success message letting you know that the application has been moved successfully:
Ensure you see the success message
  • If you now go to your settings — applications — manage installed applications, you will see the application you moved has the USB logo next to it, indicating that its now running from the USB drive

You can watch the full video here: