Accessories External hard disk?

Originally Posted by ivan

A question. Does the EE see the usb drive at all?

No, it doesn't see it at all. As far as I know, I cannot change the format of such a large drive (500 GB) without making like 10-15 partitions .

Originally Posted by borisb

Just to throw it out there - are you plugging the hard drive into the large USB connector on the eDGe, or the mini-USB connector? The latter is only for PC-to-eDGe connection, not for USB devices...

I use the "regular" USB connector, the big one.

Originally Posted by kenjennings

When you plug the drive into a Windows PC, does it also automatically create one of those virtual CD devices on the PC that contains Windows drivers, etc?

Nope, not that I'm aware of.

BorisB

I too am having problems connecting external USB drives to my EE.

I have successfully connected USB flash drive to the EE - not a problem. However, I've tried different things to connect USB HDDs without success. Wondering how you/others succeeded doing this?!?!

• My WD/HDD passport is 160GB USB powered (no provision for external power) - model WD1600U17-004
• FAT32 formatted (have also tried NTFS also without success).
• 160G capacity, single partition - have tried 32G partion also w/o success

When I connect the USB/HDD the LED comes on (flickers high low - whatever that means in WD language), I can hear the hard drive armature doing something but EE does not recognize it.

I spoke w/ EE 1st tier customer support - they say I need a "Y" cable which virtually defeats EE's portability.

Have read others successfully connecting external USB/HDDs. Can someone please elaborate...

What USB/HDDs appear to work?
External power needed/applied?
"Y" cable needed?

Any/all assistance appreciated.

Thx

Attila

Originally Posted by borisb

Yes, any external USB drive will work. The small portable ones are best as most don't require an AC adapter to work with the eDGe (for example, the Western Digital Passport drives). If your drive comes with a Y cable, you'll probably need to plug it into both USB ports to provide sufficient power to the drive. Some forum members have reported that some small portable drives do need separate AC power to run, but I can vouch that the WD Passport ones don't.

Bear in mind that external drives will reduce the battery runtime of the eDGe.

You may want to consider large USB memory sticks instead - something like a 32 Gb or 64 Gb one. These don't draw the same amount of power as a hard drive.

Why do you say a Y cable defeats the portability? The edge has 2 USB ports available and many drives come standard with Y cable.

I agree with Cheyennedonna. While I'm no expert, it sounds as though your drive may not be getting enough power which is why it would need the Y cable.

I've hooked up WD MyBook to the Edge with no problem...of course that one has external power. So it's likely that the power is the issue.

Of course, I don't know why you need that much disk space when carrying the Edge around...I was only hooking it up to an external hard drive to move recordings and PDFs and porn and such out of my Edge's precious onboard memory, so it's not like I'm carrying the drive around with my Edge all the time.

Originally Posted by attila.j.horvath

What USB/HDDs appear to work?
External power needed/applied?
"Y" cable needed?

I've used a 500 Gb WD Passport USB-powered external hard drive with my EE in the past. No external power, no "Y" cable for this particular model.

Originally Posted by sjarrel

FWIW, I have a LaCie 500 Gb external drive. NTFS-formatted and powered on AC. Works fine with the EE.

I tried to connect to my Pocket eDGe a LaCie 320 Gb, formatted FAT 32 in order to run on both Mac and PC: no luck, also negative with external power. LaCie replied that they do not support Android. Did you do something special to overcome this?

Originally Posted by wfvries

I tried to connect to my Pocket eDGe a LaCie 320 Gb, formatted FAT 32 in order to run on both Mac and PC: no luck, also negative with external power. LaCie replied that they do not support Android. Did you do something special to overcome this?

No, it's normally connected to my Windows PC. I just tested it with the eDGE. No problems. NTFS formatted though. Maybe this makes the difference?

To answer my own question: no. it makes no difference.
I tested this morning the external drives (all with external power):
La Cie - 500 GB - NTFS formatted
MyBook - 1000 GB - NTFS formatted
Maxtor - 150 GB - FAT32 formatted
They all work on my PC with Windows Vista.
They all work on my PC with Linux Ubuntu.
They all work well with the (large) eDGe. So I don't understand the statement that LaCie does not support Android. Maybe someone with both EE and PE can tell if there is a difference between the EE and the PE here?

Sjarrel, there is only one thing that will stop the eDGe reading an external usb drive - how the drive is formatted.

I have several usb drives that we use for temporary backup, all of them formatted to HPFS (the OS/2 High Performance File System as all our systems are OS/2) - the eDGe does not see those drives. As an experiment I formatted one to FAT32 and tried that - the eDGe sees it without problems.

It maybe the LaCie people were thinking about the media centre usb drive that I think has a custom front end that will not work with Android. Other than that, like you, I have found that external usb drive formatted with a windows format - one used by windows - will work on the eDGe. I don't know about the PE, not having one, but would assume they should do likewise.

Oddly, the edge/Android also won't mount drives formatted ext2/ext3 which is pretty much a Linux standard (on which Android runs.)