[MGK001]

I am thinking of trying out a 2.5" hard drive with my Fire (I'm going away to the other side of the world on holiday for a month).
I have ordered a USB OTG cable and want to try hooking it up to a 500gb Seagate 2.5" external hard drive with lots of music & movies on it.

Has anyone tried this out? Does it work or am I stuck with flash drives only?

[iamliakos]

MGK001, on 30 January 2013 - 01:00 PM, said:

I am thinking of trying out a 2.5" hard drive with my Fire (I'm going away to the other side of the world on holiday for a month).
I have ordered a USB OTG cable and want to try hooking it up to a 500gb Seagate 2.5" external hard drive with lots of music & movies on it.

Has anyone tried this out? Does it work or am I stuck with flash drives only?

I just tried to connect my fire with a 2.5' external disk Western Digital and it didnt work. I suppose that the power, that the disk needs to work, isnt enough.
Although the power led light of my 2.5' disk is on but nothing happens.

[MGK001]

Thanks for that iamliakos.

Looks like it's flash drives only then?

[iamliakos]

MGK001, on 30 January 2013 - 09:41 PM, said:

Thanks for that iamliakos.

Looks like it's flash drives only then?

Yeap i think so. I checked with a 8gb flash drive Kingston and it worked fine.
I tried to connect another 2.5' external HD because the previous that i tested(western digital) was a usb3 disk so i though to check a usb2 HD too.
But nothing happened. In addition i heard a noise from the controller like "biiiiiip" ,so i suppose the power is the problem.

[michpan]

Hard drives without external power source in general, don't work. There's just not enough power via the usb port. I've tried all sorts of usb disks though and everything worked fine..


Michael

[MGK001]

Thanks guys.

[Tzul]

No idea how much power the Ainol tablets can provide to USB clients.
However, I just connected a 2.5" 1TB HDD (HGST Travelstar 5K1000) to my Aurora 2 and it DOES work without external power supply.

Yes, the tablet powered an external HDD using only its battery, and I could access the HDD's files.

USB2 data ports are rated 5V, 500mA. That makes 2.5W - if the power consumption of your external HDD plus its case stays below that, it could work.
The HDD that I tried is rated 1.6W (=320mA at 5V). I monitored the battery discharge current and it more or less fit. With the HDD connected, the battery discharge current was around 400mA higher.

The biggest problem I had was the crappy Ainol OTG cable. It has bad contact and doesn't work if the angle isn't exactly right. However, the Aurora 2 has mini USB, which is mechanically inferior to the Fire's micro USB port.

This post has been edited by Tzul: 31 January 2013 - 07:04 PM

[Steve8x8]

I had tried to hook up my Garmin GPS handheld, but it would power on and down in endless cycles.
The solution I found was:
- get a powered USB hub
- power the hub from a USB power bank
- connect the hub to the OTG cable
- finally connect the Garmin
- which auto-mounts

[I ran into another issue back then, when the system would mount all partitions (the Garmin Oregon has internal storage as well as an "external" microSD) but unmounting from the settings menu would only get rid of one mount point. This seems to be a general issue with Androids, and cannot be easily worked around AFAICT, as StickMount doesn't replace the OS internal mount done by ueventd.
If your disk has only one mountable partition, this caveat wouldn't apply to you - and I haven't retried for a while; CM 10.1 may behave differently.]

To disconnect, you have to observe the right order, otherwise there's a risk to hang the tablet:
- unmount the filesystem(s)
- disconnect the disk
- disconnect the OTG
- power down the hub

[michpan]

Tzul, on 31 January 2013 - 06:59 PM, said:

No idea how much power the Ainol tablets can provide to USB clients.
However, I just connected a 2.5" 1TB HDD (HGST Travelstar 5K1000) to my Aurora 2 and it DOES work without external power supply.

Yes, I could use a few hard disks with my Aurora as well but this isn't the case with Fire..


Michael

[Tzul]

michpan, on 03 February 2013 - 01:52 PM, said:

Yes, I could use a few hard disks with my Aurora as well but this isn't the case with Fire..

Hard to imagine, as both are using nearly the same hardware (unless you're talking about the Aurora 1).

[myrdrwin]

I tested my ADATA HV610 1Tbyte USB3 2,5" HDD and it work fine.

[michpan]

Yes I'm talking about the first one. I've tried 3 different disks with a capacity of 500, 750 and 1 tb and none of them worked. The first two work fine with my aurora..



Sent from my Novo7Fire using Tapatalk HD

[Steve8x8]

Another - somewhat related - issue:
If there are multiple partitions on the disk, will they be properly mounted, and even more important, can they be properly unmounted via Settings>Storage, or do you have to use a terminal and type umount commands by hand?
(StickMount would handle this if the system itself wouldn't grab the filesystems.)

[dalyer]

Presumably a hard disk WITH external power should work? (Haven't tried it yet)

[michpan]

Yes, hard disks with external power should work fine..


Michael