One thing I noticed about my Galaxy S was it did tend to slow down as I added more and more apps.  Me being an appoholic, it wasn’t long before I had 60 user added apps on it and it started to slow a little.  It would appear Samsung have used in this device, one of the slowest internal memory cards known to man in.  To counter the drag effect caused by this, you use your own SD card to store the apps.  This is nothing new, many ROM developers have an Apps2SD hack which will store the whole app on a partition of the SD card.  In this hack, we move just the Apps data to the SD, in much the way I believe FroYo might do.

During this process we will also root the SGS, which seems very easy to do.  We don’t yet have a recovery mode for the SGS though, so procede with extreme caution.  We cannot take any responsibilty for you turning your lovely new Samsung into a paper weight…

If you have the cojones for it, read on!

I should start off by pointing out, I haven’t figured this out myself, as I have before, I’m taking other people’s hard work and spelling it out for the everyman.

I#m going to assume you have USB drivers already and your PC can see your SGS when plugged in.  If not, you want to look for a Samsung Kies download, which brings with is the necessary drivers. Start of by downloading this zip file, it has everything we’re going to need.  Unzip it all onto your desktop. Ready?

Step 1 – Flashing to JG5*

At the time of writting, JG5* is the latest version of software for the SGS, so we’re going to update to this.

*UPDATE 8th August – I’ve moved on to a more recent firmware version, so you might want to try downloading this file and using the contents for the next step.  I’ve also now moved up to **Ext4 which is giving me an even better speed improvement!

1. Put your SGS into download mode (hold volume down + home button and turn it on)
2. Run Odin and plug in your SGS via USB.  It should appear just under ID:COM
3. Click on PIT and select ‘s1_odin_20100512.pit’
4. Click PDA and select ‘CODE_I9000XWJG5.tar’
5. Click PHONE and select ‘MODEM_I9000XXJG1.tar’
6. Select ‘re-partition’ only if you want to wipe and start fresh.
7. Click start.  This should take maybe a couple of minutes and will reboot your device.

Step 2 – Partition your Micro SD

I did this in my Nexus One, using RA Recovery but I realise not everyone will have this option.  You need to partition it to have 2 physical partitions, the first is FAT32 and the second Ext3**.  The Ext3** partition is where the apps data goes, so should be 512 to 1024 meg in size.  If you have Linux experience, you can use Gparted.  If you’re windows based, look for Paragon Hard Disk Manager.  Better results are reported from a proper Linux format though.  Remember, FAT32 first, then Ext3 but both should be Physical drives.

Step 3 – Flashing the Mimo fix

Head back into Odin for this again.  Connect your SGS back up, sometimes you need to remove the battery and go back into download mode to get it to recognise the device on your PC.

1. Select the same PIT file
2. This time select ‘Kernel_GalaxyS_mimo_v3.tar’ as the PDA file.
3. Click start and you should be done in a matter of seconds.

Boot the device back up and take a look in the root using a file browser of some kind.  You should hopefully see /disk/ which is your mounted SD Ext3 partition.

Step 4 – The root update

While the phone is still on, copy the update.zip to the root of the SD card.  Shut down the phone and then boot into the basic console by holding volume up, home button and then powering on.  Select to update using the update.zip and again, in a matter of seconds this will apply.  Reboot and we’re ready to apply the actual hack.

Step 5 – The actual hack

Connect your SGS and then head to your ADB folder on your PC.  If you’ve never used ADB before, I might suggest you want to take 5 minutes to look into that first.  Hopefully you know a little about this already, as you’re attempting rather dangerous stuff on your device.  So, these are the commands you want to type -

1. adb shell  -  gets you to the devices shell
2. su – gives you root access
3. busybox cp -rp /data/data /disk/  - copies your app data to the SD card
4. busybox mv /data/data /data/data.bak  - backs up your app data
5. busybox ln -s /disk/data /data/data – links your new folder, so it uses the SD card partition

You should now be set.  There is a ‘market fix’ too -

1. busybox mv /system/media /disk/ – moves your market data
2. busybox ln -s /disk/media /system/media – sets up a link to the SD card partition
3. reboot  - reboots the device!

When it comes back up, you should be all done!  Hopefully things are moving much slicker now.

In case you need to undo this, you should be able to do so with these commands -

1. adb shell
2. su
3. busybox rm /data/data – removes the link
4. busybox cp -rp /disk/data /data/ – copies app data back to the phone from the SD partition
5. busybox rm /data/data.bak – deletes the backup file

The final thing I did to try and keep the Galaxy S moving along nicely was to install MinFreeManager and set it to aggressive (don’t forget to set it to apply on boot).  My understanding is, this uses the inbuilt memory manager, but makes it a little more brutal on killing apps not in use any more.

As I said before, this is not my own work and taken mainly from this thread on the MoDaCo forums.  A big thanks to Mimocan and also DistortedLoop for the ‘undo’.

Let us know how you get on!