I found this explanation helpful (clicked on a link in the thread you posted):
Quote:
Prior to honeycomb devices they didn't have all the internal storage build in. They had limited non-volatile storage and for most anything to actually work you had to add an SDCard to get storage, which mounted under /mnt/sdcard. On the honeycomb devices they build much more non-volatile storage into the device but to get applications to utilize it they mounted that storage under /mnt/sdcard because that is where apps expected the storage space to be.
But that left the issue of removable storage and how that would be handled. So google set it up to external removable storage gets mounted under /mnt/external#. So your SDCard gets treated as removable media storage and is mounted under /mnt/external1 which requires a different permission to access it than the stuff mounted under /mnt/sdcard. Its kind of confusing at first but if you just think of your SDCard more generically as a removable storage device, and not specifically an SDCard it might be easier to understand.
To write to /mnt/sdcard applications must request the android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission. To write to the /mnt/external1 they have to request the android.permission.WRITE_MEDIA_STORAGE permissions.
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