Hooking up a hard drive

[babracmmm]

Instead of carrying around a lot of Dvds for my son to watch, could I hook up an external hard drive to my tablet and watch movies from that? I know I can with a thumb drive but is there a size limit on those?

 

[Golfdriver97]

They do have jump drives that can connect via the micro USB port. I am not sure how well they work though for large files.

From an AOSP M8

 

[SpookDroid]

It depends on the drive. Most external drives require power that the tablet cannot output, and therefore cannot be used. It'll probably recognize it but when it starts spinning, that's where the power is not enough.

Not sure if a solid state external drive (if such a thing is out there) would work though, as these require much less power.

If it's an externally-powered drive, though, then yeah, it should work. As long as the drive is formatted as FAT32 or ExFAT (NTFS will not work with Android as this is an MS-proprietary file system).

 

[dpham00]

I have seen 1 terabyte flash drive though it is expensive

Sent from my Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note 4

 

[babracmmm]

Thanks for the suggestions. Does anyone know if there is a size limit to a thumb drive that N7 can read from?

 

[Groid]

If you use the Stickmount app it has the ability to use ntfs filesystem for something like a 64Gb or 128 Gb microsd card.

 

[babracmmm]

Thanks, but it looks like you have to be rooted for stickmount, which I'm not. Is there something I can use for nonrooted? I don't want to buy a 128 gig thumb drive and then not have it work.

 

[kathy13xia]

Is your hard drive or SD card FAT32 formatted? This kind of drive has some kind of single file limitation. As I know is if the single file over 4GB, it cannot be transferred or displayed on your device. Just a small tip.