Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
I use a small hard drive with my Chromebook.
 |
And a little experimentation showed I could do it with my tablet. I have a 512MB Seagate Free Agent portable USB drive intended as a backup solution.
Some will do it out of the box. Toshiba's Android tablet, for example, will work out of the box with a Toshiba external drive formatted exFAT.
Mine needed external assistance. It has to be rooted (which it is), and I neded to install the
Paragon exFAT, NTFS & HFS+ helper from the Play Store. The Paragon driver uses the Linux NTFS 3g framework to support NTFS drives.
The tablet doesn't have the power to drive the Seagate (which is unpowered) successfully. Plugged in directly, the Paragon driver sees it, tries to mount it, then loses it again. The solution is to plug it into a powered hub, and plug the hub into the tablet. Paragon sees it and mounts it at /mnt/usbhost1. A root-enabled file manager is needed to explore the drive file system. I use an open source program called Ultra Explorer I found on the XDA Developer forums, though others exist.
I use a hub anyway, to support an external keyboard and mouse. This is simply another device attached.
I don't see using the capability a lot, but the fact that I
can makes it one more tool in the box.
______
Dennis