How can I read the external hard drive from my Droid Turbo and SSGtablet 4?

[gow75]

reading external hard drive from droid turbo and SSGtablet 4

I want to use an external hard drive that has contents that i want to be able to view on my samsung galaxy tablet or my motorola droid turbo. how can i do this without rooting them? if i to root is there a guide that is easy to follow for both devices. i have the proper connection type usb connector. thanks

 

[hallux]

Re: reading external hard drive from droid turbo and SSGtablet 4

Unless the external HDD is self-powered (uses a wall-wart or some other connection to a wall outlet) you're likely not going to get it to work. The phone won't be able to provide enough power to the drive to spin the platters.

You should be able to use an OTG cable to connect a flash drive without rooting your devices.

 

[gow75]

Re: reading external hard drive from droid turbo and SSGtablet 4

i have an external hard drive that has a plug in power cord.

 

[hallux]

Re: reading external hard drive from droid turbo and SSGtablet 4

On my 2013 Moto X (should be VERY similar to the Turbo), in Storage is an option to mount USB storage that is greyed out. Once a storage device is connected through OTG, that option turns into a readout of the available space on the device as well as the option to eject it, and I can read the storage device. On my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014), once the OTG device was connected it slid a window out from the right side allowing me to browse all my files including those on the OTG device.

For what it's worth, my OTG "cable" is really a desktop 4-port charge box with a 5th USB port for OTG use. I tried connecting a bus-powered (no wall-wart) USB HDD to it and it would not mount even though it was seen as USB storage for the sake of making the option available to mount the USB storage. I also tried with a self-powered (with wall-wart) USB HDD and that wouldn't mount but that one is formatted for a Mac.

 

[doogald]

Re: reading external hard drive from droid turbo and SSGtablet 4

... but that one is formatted for a Mac.

This is a good point. Any drive that's formatted NTFS may not be mountable on the Turbo. It should be able to read FAT32, exFAT, and Linux partitions.

 

[Mikey D_PhD]

Re: reading external hard drive from droid turbo and SSGtablet 4

This is a good point. Any drive that's formatted NTFS may not be mountable on the Turbo. It should be able to read FAT32, exFAT, and Linux partitions.

From my experience with this, the Turbo will only read FAT32. I've never gotten it to read exFAT or NTFS. There's an older thread in this forum about formatting larger drives to FAT32.

 

[doogald]

Re: reading external hard drive from droid turbo and SSGtablet 4

From my experience with this, the Turbo will only read FAT32. I've never gotten it to read exFAT or NTFS. There's an older thread in this forum about formatting larger drives to FAT32.

That's great, thanks for clarifying!

 

[slcbtf]

Re: reading external hard drive from droid turbo and SSGtablet 4

I've used thumb drives before and once they are connected via an OTG cable I use an app called Nexus Media Importer to access the files.

 

[gow75]

Re: reading external hard drive from droid turbo and SSGtablet 4

ive attached photos of what devices i have the usb connector to the moto turbo and the external hard drive.