How to connect External hard disk with an Android smart phone? (1 TB, 2 TB) | DigiTech Geeks

How to connect External hard disk with an Android smart phone? (1 TB, 2 TB)

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Hard drives are often considered more private and secure (and are especially useful where there is no wireless connection).

But How to connect these storage drives so that you can directly use them in your Android mobiles.

Let's get a step by step guide for it.

Assuming that your android phone supports USB OTG(On The Go) feature any type of Usb device can be connected to your phone using an OTG Cable.
USB On-The-Go, often abbreviated to USB OTG or just OTG, is a specification that allows other USB devices, such as USB flash drives, digital cameras, mice or keyboards, to be attached to them.

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All you have to do is to plug in that small end that you see to your phone and plug in the usb device that you want to access through your phone into the regular sized usb port that you see.(that is the other end)
 :)
However since you are trying to connect a hard drive to your android phone
The fact that your phone will be able to read the drive or not heavily depends upon the power requirement of the Hard Drive 
You see hard drives consume alot of power and its sometimes not possible for the phone to deliver it.
A Soution for this?

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Buy this its available on all electronic stores this will surely get you going.
Insert the
HDD in the regular sized USB PORT plug in one of the usb mini port to your otg enabled device and the other one to a power supply like you cell phones charger.
P.S use
ES FILE EXPLORER to explore your HDD.

Update 1 :

I would definitely recommend you guys to first try and connect your hard drive directly to your phone via the OTG cable as explained in the beginning to see if it works. If it doesn't then try with external power supply.

Update 2 :

NTFS File Format Problem:

The format in which your hard drive has been formatted plays a key role in whether your mobile device would be able to read the external hard drive or not.

You see pen drives are mostly formatted in FAT 32 or EX FAT format which are easily readable by mobile devices however External Hard Drives are mostly formatted in NTFS due to their large storage and this formatting is not readable by mobile device systems!

So what can you do in case you have a loaded hard drive in NTFS format which you want to connect to your smartphone?

Formatting it to FAT 32 or EX FAT wouldn't make sense since your hard drive is already loaded.

What you can do is

Download a file manager by the name of Total Commander once you have downloaded it open it and give all the permissions needed then close it.

Go to the Play Store again and download another application called Paragon exFAT/NTFS USB Android

Now open it and give all the permissions.

Keep this app open. (Or you can open this app after you have successfully connected your hard drive to your phone with or without external power supply)

Now connect your hard drive via the OTG cable to your phone if your phone is able to provide the output power needed for the hard drive you will see your hard drive appear in the Paragon exFAT/NTFS USB Android application

There will be a mount button next to the name of your hard drive just click on it and the contents of your hard drive would be automatically accessible to you via the Total Commander file manager application.

You can connect using a USB OTG - Y cable (or a simple USB OTG cable if your phone port has enough power). If you are using a Y cable, you need a powerbank.

If your hard drive is using NTFS file format, your phone may not detect it. But you can use ES File Explorer to access it. OTG Cables are cheap and you can buy a decent one on Amazon. This one has good reviews: OTG USB host with Y splitter and power supply cable

NOTE :

The phone that I used for this is Red MI 4 and I was able to connect and use a 1 TB hard drive via OTG without external power supply.

*Source: http://destyy.com/wKsAXx