Connecting am external hard drive.

[revsi]

Hi everyone,
I'm wondering if it's possible to connect am external hard drive to z3?
Over seen others doing it on other android device. Got an otg cable, connected my hard drive but the phone isn't picking it up or I'm doing something wrong.

Any help with this would be appreciated.

[Rickard]

Yes, the phone supports this but you need to make sure the drive is formatted with FAT32 or exFAT. The phone does not support NTFS.

Depending on the drive, it may also require a separate power supply. The phone can supply 500mA to a USB device.

[revsi]

Hi Rickard,
I'm guessing the only way to check the format is to contact it to a laptop or PC.
I've a sneaky suspicion the hard drive is NTFS. I've a lot of stuff on my hard drive so I don't want to lose that by changing the format 😕

[Rickard · Accepted solution]

Yes, you can check which file system that is used if you connect it to a PC, right click the drive in explorer and select Properties.

It is possible to convert NTFS to FAT without deleting any data but i would not do that without first making a backup in case anything goes wrong. And if you have files larger that 4GB there will be issues with these as FAT32 doesn't support that. exFAT supports it but i haven't seen any tool that can convert from NTFS to exFAT without wiping the disk.

[RohitTech]

I dont think thats possible and healthy for an external drive.

Laptop drives which power on without any external power wont work.

Only drives requiring external power will work.

And ssuucckking up 500mah is way too much as the device and drive both shutdown within 4-5minutes as 2600mah is the max battery capacity of the phone.

[Seeking]

Hello Richard,

I just purchased recenltly a z3 plus and i love it! However i'm now trying to connect an usb external 1tb toshiba hdd. Before anything, i say that i succeeded to connect it on my old s5 mini. I used an otg usb power cable, pluggin a powerbank as power supply, and even an usb hub, so i was able to direct trasfer 2gb datas from an usb pen to the toshiba drive, all using my s5 mini as a bridge.

So why the z3 plus in not able to do the same? I guess has something to do with the non-direct otg function, so that it need to be searched and maybe the drive goes in timeout...

What do you think?

Thanks!!

Btw Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!