How to Connect an External Drive to an Android Phone or Tablet?

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Phone to External Hard Drive: Is It Possible?

The storage of an Android phone or tablet is limited. When your phone or tablet runs out of space, you can choose to transfer files from your phone to an external drive. However, can an external hard drive be directly connected to a phone?

Here is the answer: if your phone is USB-OTG supported, you are allowed to connect your phone to an external hard drive for data storage.

How to Connect an External Drive to Phone?

The following steps are also available for external hard drive to Android tablet.

Step 1: Check if your phone is USB OTG compatible

If you want to connect an external hard drive to your phone, your phone must be USB-OTG supported. USB OTG has been available for years. It is a mature technique now. You can use a special tool like USB OTG Checker to make a confirmation. You can download this tool from Google Play Store. Then, you can run it to check your phone.

Step 2: Select a suitable external hard drive for phone

Not all external hard drives are suitable for phone hard drives.  If you decide to purchase one, you can consult the product customer service to ask for professional advice and select the most suitable product according to your requirements.

However, you cannot directly connect an external hard drive to your Phone. You need to use an OTG adapter as a medium.

Step 3: Make sure your phone has enough power for larger capacity drives

The external hard drive does not supply power itself. It needs your device to supply power. If you connect an external drive to your PC, your computer will have enough power to make the external drive function. But a phone might not have enough power supply for a larger capacity drive. For example, most smartphones can only provide about 0.5A of power. It is not enough.

However, you can break this limit by adding an additional power source. For example, you can connect a power bank to your phone and then connect the external hard drive to your phone. You should note that you need to have a more powerful OTG adapter for connecting an external hard drive and a power bank to your phone.

If you use a special OTG USB drive for your phone, there should be no need for an external power supply. You can directly connect the USB flash drive to your phone for further use.

Step 4: Connect the external hard drive to your phone

You can connect your external hard drive to your phone when everything is prepared.

Tip: recover files from external hard drives using MiniTool Power Data Recovery

However, you may lose files and information on the external hard drive by mistake. You can use MiniTool Power Data Recovery to get your missing data back. This software can work on all versions of Windows. It can recover data from SSDs, hard disk drives, USB flash drives, SD cards, memory cards, and other types of storage devices. You can first try the free edition of this software and see if it can find your needed files and recover 1 GB of files without paying any cent.

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You will need to use an advanced edition to recover more files.

Bottom Line

Now, you should know how to connect an external hard drive to your Android phone. Of course, you can also use these steps to connect an external drive to your Android tablet.