Connecting a hard drive to the tablet. The best hard drives for tablets, laptops and desktops

Manufacturers of modern smartphones and tablets equip their devices with a decent screen and memory, but at one point you may receive this message: “the device is running out of memory.” This can happen for various reasons:

Received SMS messages were not deleted
Uploaded a lot of movies
There are a lot of video and photo files on your device

What to do in this difficult situation? Many users are interested in how to connect to a tablet external hard disk to have more memory?

Tablets from Google don't have additional slots for memory cards, although Galaxy Nexus tablets have built-in memory of 16 GB or more, this space may not be enough to download modern movies or games.

On many modern tablets They install a decent amount of memory, but it may run out someday. So the question arises: is it possible to connect an external hard drive? The answer to this question is very simple - it is accessible even to a novice user. But first you need to purchase it. And our article will tell you several ways to do this.

What do you need to connect an external hard drive?

How to connect a tablet to an external hard drive via a USB cable

Usually all external drives come with a set of cables, so we’ll use them. Find the USB port on the side and connect one end of the cable to it and the other to the drive. In this case, you need to use only a branded cable, and in no case should you try to make it yourself, it may not only burn out new hard disk, but the motherboard in the tablet will also be damaged.

You can also connect via USB port separate keyboard or a joystick for games, or any other device. But the tablet itself must detect it and install a separate driver, otherwise working with them will be impossible.

The principle of choosing an external hard drive for a tablet

An external drive is needed for those users who need to save a lot various information, and so we need to start

From the choice of memory size. The performance of the disk and, of course, its price will depend on this parameter. There are two types of disks: 2.5 inches and 3.5 inches. 2.5-inch drives can have memory of both 1200 GB and 1.5 TB, and 3.5-inch drives have very great memory up to 2-4 TB.

If you plan to save many movies or network information, then you need a disk with about 2 TB of memory, but what if you only need to store text information, then a disk with a small memory will be enough for you.

In addition, all 2.5-inch drives can operate without problems from a USB port; they are more reliable and more user-friendly: they can withstand numerous shocks and shocks, which cannot be said about 3.5-inch drives.

Now you know how to connect an external hard drive to your tablet and how to select it.

Android OS tablets today are positioned as full-fledged workplaces. It's no joke, they actually already know a lot, including working with numerous USB peripherals. Mice, keyboards, printers, game controllers and many other devices connect to tablets via special cable. But, without a doubt, the most familiar and popular USB device, familiar to everyone, is a regular USB flash drive. In today's article you will learn how to easily “make friends” of your tablet with absolutely any flash drive.

What is USB-OTG? This technology appeared back in 2001 and was intended for the same thing it is used for now: connecting USB devices to gadgets like mobile phones and wearable media players. Key Feature OTG is that head unit(in our case, a tablet) can work in both “host” and “client” modes.

In other words, through the same port, our tablet can not only work with a flash drive, but also act as one itself when connected to a PC via the appropriate cable.

How does this work

But how exactly does this all work? Surprisingly, the technology has not undergone any significant changes since its invention. In order to switch the tablet to “host” mode, the OTG cable is equipped with special jumper, which is not included in the regular USB cable included. Thanks to this jumper, the tablet “understands” that this particular cable is connected and “gives” energy to the flash drive, rather than receiving it, for example, for charging. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it?

By the way, on at the moment There are devices that allow tablets to work with OTG and charge at the same time, which is incredibly convenient for several reasons. Instead of a jumper, they use resistance (resistor) and voltage with charger is supplied not only to the tablet itself, but also to the flash drive connected to it. Unfortunately, this function Not all tablets support it yet.

Possible problems when connecting OTG

Sometimes it happens that your cable is working properly, but for some reason the tablet stubbornly refuses to “see” external device. We'll look into why this might happen below.

What to do if OTG does not work

If you have read the list and know why OTG does not work, let's try to find several solutions to your problem.

However, it often happens that the capabilities of FAT32 become insufficient. The fact is that this file system has one significant drawback– it does not support working with files larger than 4 GB. This drawback can be very critical for those who like to watch movies on their tablet. high resolution. NTFS does not have such a problem, and this is where the question arises of how to teach our tablet to work with this file system. There are several ways to do this. The simplest is to install programs that allow you to mount NTFS on any device running Android OS. The most common one among them is “Paragon NTFS & HFS+”. It is distributed free of charge and allows you to mount not only NTFS, but also HFS+, which Apple uses in its Macs. The program is very convenient and simple. Its only drawback is that you need ROOT rights to work with it.

As for portable HDDs. As noted above, most of them will not work with tablets due to higher power consumption. How can we deal with this problem?

The first option is an active USB hub. This is a regular USB hub, but with external power supply, allowing you to connect more devices without loss of speed. Flaw this method— not all tablets support hubs, plus an additionally occupied outlet.

Example of an active USB hub

The second option is HDD with external power supply. It’s not only tablets that lack the “strength” to spin up external HDDs. Some laptops also cannot cope with this task, so you can often find HDDs with two USBs on sale. One goes into the tablet, the second goes into the charger.

But the HDD with external power supply

Don't forget that almost all HDDs are formatted in NTFS, so before connecting the hard drive to the tablet, you should take care of this too.

The basics of working with external drives

So, we connected the flash drive to our tablet, what next? All modern file managers support USB-OTG. The most popular and functional is “ES Explorer”. In order to “get” to the flash drive, you need to select the appropriate item in the main menu. Now you can view files on it, edit them, copy, delete and perform any actions with them, just as you do with a microSD card or the memory of the tablet itself.

Main menu of the ES Explorer program

USB drive opened in the program

If it is not possible to install a file manager, you can find a flash drive connected to the tablet through the manager built into the firmware. Some standard FMs are capable of displaying external flash drives in the main menu, like “ES Explorer”, while others require independent search external drives. You can find a USB flash drive at the following address - root of the tablet memory (root) - storage - usbdisk.

Tablet memory root

And here is the flash drive itself

The read/write speed depends both on the flash drive itself and on the characteristics of your tablet. New devices that support USB 3.0, for example, allow you to work with external drives at speeds that are in no way inferior to internal memory.

You can test a flash drive for read/write speed on Android, for example, using the “A1 SD Bench” program.

A1 SD Bench program

Is it possible to “make friends” between two Android tablets via OTG?

Surely, this is a question that interested many after reading this article. There are situations when you need to convey large volume information from one tablet to another. For example, a folder with photos, big game or a movie of a gigabyte or two in size. Of course, even if the tablet has the latter Bluetooth versions, you will have to wait more than one hour. This, of course, is not an option. This begs the question, is it possible to connect two Android tablets or smartphones to each other via OTG? The answer is yes. However, there are some limitations. WITH latest versions Android Google is gradually moving away from mounting device memory as USB drives. Now most Android devices are connected using the MTP protocol, that is, as media devices, since this is more secure from a corporate point of view.

Smartphone connected via MTP

What does this mean? And the fact that Android does not currently support MTP connection to it. You can get around this by switching your smartphone or tablet to standard storage mode using the corresponding item in the settings. If there are no such settings, you can try to do this using special programs. Unfortunately, these programs are not a panacea and will not work with every tablet.

If the tablet does not work as a drive

As a result, if your tablet does not work as a drive, you only have one output for transferring large volume information - WiFi. The essence of such a transfer is the following - one device is the host and opens the access point, and the other is the client, which, in fact, connects to this point. Today, many programs allow such transfer, for example, the same “ES Explorer” or the MiDrop function of Xiaomi. But the most convenient program is SHAREit

Although it was copied from the Transfer application in MIUI (they even connect without problems), it is supported by all Android devices and provides enormous data transfer speeds. There is no comparison with Bluetooth. In addition to this, it looks nice, is very convenient to use and allows you to transfer data even to Apple products. In general, this is truly a “must have” for any Android device.

Not so long ago, the volume of internal storage of mobile phones was measured in hundreds of megabytes or best case scenario units of gigabytes. It could be expanded if the device supported external cards memory, the size of which was also not much larger. Today, due to the rapid increase in weight of popular games and video files modern smartphones and tablets are equipped with built-in memory up to 256 Gb; micro-SD cards have a similar maximum volume.

But the price of such devices is still steep. In addition, even the built-in 256 GB of memory will not allow you to carry a good collection of movies with you. high resolution, which “weigh” 25 gigabytes or more each. For this purpose there are drives on hard magnetic disks (hard drives), the volume of which can exceed 10 terabytes. Moreover, you can buy them much cheaper than flash memory. The only problem is how to connect an external hard drive to your phone or tablet.

Winchesters were originally created to work with personal computers, so they have appropriate interfaces - IDE, SATA, SCSI, etc. However, there are several ways to “make friends” of the HDD with mobile devices. Let us immediately note that all of them, except the last one, are suitable only for devices that support the OTG standard. You can find out this in the instructions or by installing the “USB OTG Checker” utility for Android. We also remember that even a cool smartphone with a powerful battery is not always able to “spin up the HDD pancakes” without additional power.

Choosing an external hard drive for your phone

Today in computer stores you can find hard drives with different form factors, volumes and interfaces. Let's consider each of available options from the point of view of use in conjunction with smartphones and tablets.

Classic 3.5-inch HDD

Suppose you have a standard “computer” hard drive, say, 4 TB, from Seagate, Western Digital or another manufacturer. Most likely he will have SATA interface. To connect such a drive to the phone we need three things:

For phones that support USB standard 3.0, cables should be selected accordingly to ensure maximum speed transfers. You can connect the hard drive not only to a phone or tablet, but also to a laptop, SMART TVs, media players and other devices with USB ports.

Unfortunately, the only advantage of using a classic 3.5-inch HDD is minimum cost in terms of 1Gb. There are more disadvantages - bulkiness, connection complexity, noise.

Laptop 2.5-inch HDD

Everything here is similar to the previous version, only the hard drive is significantly smaller in size. In addition, it runs quieter and runs cooler. However, compared to full-format drives, laptop models are more expensive per 1Gb and operate slower due to the reduced spindle speed.

This regular hard drive(most often 2.5-inch), placed in a case that already has SATA adapter To USB and power converter. You just need to connect it to the OTG cable. However, if power from mobile device will not be enough, you will have to use OTG cable with external power supply or active USB hub.

By analogy with the previous case, this is a regular hard drive, the case of which has a built-in wireless controller. You just connect to it via Wi-Fi, and it doesn't matter if it supports OTG phone or not. The most advanced models also have a built-in battery that is rechargeable from the mains. The only drawback is high cost device

In conclusion, a few words about another problem that many users face, judging by the forums in the RU segment of the Internet. Majority hard drives formatted in NTFS, and the old Android versions they don't support her. You can, of course, reformat them to FAT32, but a more reasonable solution would be to use file managers for Android that can work with NTFS. The most popular and free - Total Commander with NTFS plugin from Paragon.

Modern devices, such as tablets, display images in Full HD quality and can record information in the same quality. Plus, you have the opportunity to play powerful, detailed games and listen to music, which is now available in many different genres. But there is one point. For all these purposes, a lot of memory is required. Where can I get it? One of best options— connect an external hard drive to the tablet. It can be a memory card, flash drive or external HDD. If there are no issues with the memory card, then what needs to be done to connect an external HDD?

The vast majority of manufacturers equip tablets with connectors for a memory card slot. Often this is a micro SD card. And the memory on board the devices themselves continues to increase every year. Nowadays there are already freely available tablets with internal memory (SSD) of 64 and even 120 GB. Although there are still companies that do not provide slots for micro SD in their devices, such companies include some Nexus devices, Apple s iPad tablets etc. Here the user is content with the memory installed on the tablet by the manufacturer.

It doesn’t matter whether or not you can connect a memory card to the tablet, there will be moments in life when there will still be little memory. And there can be a lot of such situations: when going on vacation, I would like to take my favorite films with me; When you go on a visit, you need to take photos from your vacation with you, but you don’t have time to upload them to your tablet, etc. Therefore, the question arises: is it possible to increase the tablet’s memory by external storage?

Of course you can. And even a novice user can cope with this task. There are several ways to achieve your goal, we will discuss them further, and now let’s see what is needed for this.

Connecting a flash drive or HDD to a tablet on any firmware

To do this, you will need the tablet itself, which we want to connect to an external drive, and a USB-OTG adapter (cord).

Method 1. If the tablet does not support OTG, which is of course rare

We take the usual one micro USB-USB cord, connect one edge to external drive, and the other to the tablet and wait about one or two minutes. We wait until a notification appears indicating that the gadget is preparing the storage device for use. If nothing happens, try the next option.

Method 2. You will need a micro USB-OTG cable or adapter

Micro USB-OTG is a special cord, thanks to which you can connect to the tablet for work various devices external devices such as printer, radio and wired mouse, wired keyboard, gaming joysticks, flash drives and, of course, HDD. It makes sense to buy it if the first method does not work or if there is a need to connect one of the above-mentioned devices.

There are two types of such OTG:

Most common: cable that resembles a regular one USB extension cable, but it differs in the wiring of contacts.
An adapter that resembles a flash drive, with the difference that at the end there is a slot for a regular USB input with specially soldered contacts for OTG standard.

Features of connecting an external hard drive

When purchasing external HDD It is worth remembering that there is no point in taking a disk with a high speed or a very large volume, since such disks will require extra food, which can lead to fast discharge tablet.

For some devices it matters which file system information is recorded on an external NTFS or FAT32 device. Due to the fact that tablets work with the FAT32 format, some devices will not want to read information in the file NTFS system from a flash drive or HDD drive. If the information is recorded in FAT32 format, then additional settings There is no need to do this in the device; after connecting, the disk will be displayed as an additional storage device.

If the connection has occurred and the tablet sees the external device, but does not see the files located in it, then you need to install an application on the device that will allow you to see the previously unreadable format without problems.

And here too there is important point: has a tablet ROOT rights or not.

If you don’t have ROOT rights and won’t have them in the near future, you should consider purchasing paid software. Paid applications will allow you to enjoy all the delights of an external drive without hacking your tablet. One of these programs, which is available on Google Market This is Nexus Media Importer.

Well, if ROOT rights are already on the tablet, then download any from the Market free file manager, such as Total Commander or ES Explorer. After which you can use all the files on the external device.

After considering these tips, you will know how to connect an external hard drive or flash drive to your tablet and in the future, this should not cause you any additional questions.

Whether desktop, mobile or tablet - for any device you will find in this article suitable model data storage with maximum capacity and productivity.

CHIP tested 45 models of hard drives for tablets, laptops and desktops Despite the availability of cloud storage services and streaming data, the need for a constant increase in the number of gigabytes in PCs and laptops is not going away. High definition videos, new photos and an ever-growing music collection are the source of problems with disk space. Fast solid state drives are not able to solve them, since with a capacity of more than 500 GB, the cost of such solutions is unreasonably high. Only external and internal hard drives remain magnetic disks.

Before purchasing, you need to decide on the storage capacity. If you are sure that one or two terabytes will be enough for you, you can purchase a 2.5-inch HDD. If you need a drive with a capacity of up to 4 TB, you will have to choose from 3.5-inch models. The data in the tables will help you determine which drive is the best in its category. Before purchasing a drive, carefully review your system configuration: when using drives larger than 2 TB, you may encounter hardware or system limitations media capacity. We'll tell you how to bypass them and use all your available disk space.

IN lately Tablets have become very popular. But they have little internal memory. Will help expand the possibilities for storing multimedia files new type external hard disks. They connect to home network or directly to your mobile
new device by wireless communication. We checked which drive is best suited for this.

Wireless hard drives

Small mobile drives provide smartphones and tablets with up to 1 TB of additional storage space.

New drives with a built-in WLAN module fit in the pocket of any jacket, and even more so in a bag or backpack. They weigh less than 500g. They are ideal for smartphones and tablets and eliminate space constraints by providing up to a terabyte of additional capacity. Mobile devices automatically connect to the drive via wireless network, thanks to which collections of photos, films and music will always be at the user’s fingertips. Tablets and smartphones access the drive using special application provided by each manufacturer for iOS systems and Android.

Insufficiently successful implementation

Wireless drives produce good impression, however, in practice it turned out that all tested devices in some cases demonstrate unforgivable shortcomings. Thus, the winner of the Seagate Wireless Plus testing for unknown reasons does not provide the ability to create an encrypted wireless connection. However, otherwise there are practically no complaints about it. This is the only wireless drive that has a built-in DLNA server, with which it can provide access to multimedia content to all DLNA-enabled devices on your home network. In addition, this device is ahead of its competitors in terms of data transfer speed: 4 MB/s, of course, is not a record, but it is quite enough for watching 1080p movies. Other drives fare a little worse with this. The main outsider here is the solution from Transcend. The miniature HDD case has an antenna installed so small size that it is not possible to broadcast HD video, and for transferring data from a PC to other devices it is equipped only USB port 2.0. Products from Buffalo and Patriot are inexplicably hindering wireless transmission data from a mobile device to disk, which is also a very annoying circumstance.

In detail: network storage

Disk management from a smartphone or tablet Information exchange with the wireless drive is carried out via software. Successful from the point of view appearance and functionality, the result is the Media App utility for Seagate Wireless Plus (1). The program for Transcend disk StoreJet Cloud, where wireless encryption must be manually activated (2).

Play movies, music and photos from PC Copy data from computer to wireless hard The drive is best via a USB cable. IN in this case differences in transfer speed between individual drives are negligible. The only clear outsider is the model from Transcend with USB interface 2.0.

Access to multimedia content The data transfer speed from the disk to the tablet is quite enough for HD video, provided that you are not too far from the drive.