I’m looking to buy an external hard drive for all my video, to be used on the go with my Android Nexus 7 and Galaxy S3, in the region of 500gb
.
I believe the recent batch of 2.5″ external drives are low power and are bus powered from the phone or tablet but I’m finding a hard time getting reliable info on this.

Has anyone successfully done this, and if so give me names of the make/model you’re using?

Cheers!

get a rechargeable wifi drive?

That’s pretty sizeable.
Not sure on the power requirements of them, and what a smartphone can dish out with a USB OTB dongle.
Also worth looking at WiFi enabled storage (think Sandisk do one, and Kingston), for more compatibility, more battery to go round, and less wiring faff on the go. Not sure they’d go that big though?

dont you have to root or use an app to make the Nexus work with external storage on usb?

http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Storage/cat/Hard-Drive—External/subcat/–Portable-Wireless-Drives?190=500GB&limit=30&page=1

It would suck the battery from a phone pretty quickly. Why not just get a couple of SD cards and an adapter? You won’t get 500Mb but you’ll get a decent size

Sandisk ones seem to be only 64gig, but one type does have an SD card slot.

Cheers guys – wifi storage looks like a pretty good way to go. Number of supported video formats is the only drawback though (I have most formats you can think of in my library). Easy enough to transcode though.

I’ve succesfully mounted a small HD on my Nexus using either USB OTG or a free third party app, can’t remember which, but after a few minutes I had it working.

I thought about getting a multiple SD card reader, but they’re pretty hard to come by. And I don’t fancy spreading my library across multiple cards and swapping them around in a 1-card reader.

@lee do you not have a home/base computer ? I regularly sync movies to my phone/tablet but they are held either on my home computer and/or on a Samsung 1tb external drive. This cost £50 and is USB powered but not sure it will run off a phone/tablet USB

It’s never as straightforward as that! – I’ve got my video library on an external HD which I use for work (Iomega Firewire, Mac formatted), and at home we only have a Windows laptop and a tablet. I want an exFAT formatted HD that I can use with Windows, OSX & Android, and is portable, and doesn’t need a mains power supply.

Those wifi drives ^^^ look the business. Just got to find one that will play AVI format now!

Follow-up… I bought the Corsair Voyager Air wi-fi/usb/ethernet 1TB drive from Amazon for £140, and it’s the business. Does exactly what I wanted, and more; Having it ethernet enabled turns it into a kinda NAS box, which might even support web-portal viewing in the very near future. A new firmware update adds DLNA support for those new fangled tellys and media boxes for seamless integration.

Cheers y’all.

Can’t be done (not via cable anyway). USB specification dictates that things be either hosts or clients ie computers and peripherals. Tablets and phones etc are always set up to be peripherals, as are hard drives. You can’t connect two peripherals together.

That’s why the connectors are different – comptuers always have the big oblong ones and never the other kind, cos those are the host connectors.

That wifi drive sounds interesting though – you set it up as a hotspot or something, or ad-hoc connection with it?

That’s what I found – the Voyager Air is a wi-fi enabled HD with batteries to stream content to devices on-the-go, or network storage at home via ethernet (or USB). Cracking bit of kit.

I use a 500Gb Passport HD but don’t stream from it, I just drag the file over to the Nexus 7 and play it there to save on battery life. Drive runs happily on the OTG lead.