USB Hard drive to android phone

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Chris
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has any one managed to connect and use an external hard drive in a USB caddy to an Android phone

I have 2 of them and had the idea that when I go off for a week on my photography expeditions the compact flash cards get filled very quickly
and my dedicated storage device went belly up about a year ago

so my thinking was hook up one of my drives to my Galaxy Note and transfer images from my DSLR camera via my phone to the USB drive

I have plugged in both my drives and the phone does not see them
any idea's on how this might be 'do-able'
 
I think I've seen somewhere on another forum that it's possible but I can't for the life of me remember where I saw it, but I think it did get quite involved and needs some type of adapter attaching, but I might be on completely the wrong track here so I'm not promising. I'm sure it's got something to do with enabling the phone by downloading firmware or something. Hope you find something or I'm going to have to question my memory lol.
 
if there is a way to do this, please post
I'm trying to sort something about this out
on the surface you can connect your phone to your USB stick, so I have been told
 
I think it is a power problem. Are they 3.5" with their own power supply, or 2.5" laptop drives?
 
My Galaxy Note reads the SD card straight out of a D5100 but can't read/write to my WD 1TB drive, I suspect it's because the drive is NTFS formatted, I don't have another to format FAT32 to test...

The external drive must have it's own power source too, a portable drive won't work, but flash storage will (have used a variety of USB sticks).
 
My Galaxy Note reads the SD card straight out of a D5100 but can't read/write to my WD 1TB drive, I suspect it's because the drive is NTFS formatted, I don't have another to format FAT32 to test...

The external drive must have it's own power source too, a portable drive won't work, but flash storage will (have used a variety of USB sticks).

Not tried it myself but apparently....

There's an app for that

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kwull.ntfsmounter&hl=en
 
Firstly you need a USB host cable. You can get then for a few pounds from amazon.

People have been able to power a portable hard disk from an android device but it might vary from model to model. You would be safest with a 3.5" drive and external power supply. My phone doesn't support NTFS so you will need to keep it to fat32.
 
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