Just as we use a flash drive or an external hard drive to copy things from the computer and free up space, we can do the exact same thing on an Android mobile. In fact, it’s a pretty quick way to get external memory in our mobileif it does not support Micro SD cards.
If you have an old flash drive at home, you can use it as an external memory for your mobile, for example, move old photos there periodically and free up space on your mobile, although other uses may come to mind. In the end, as with external hard drives for PCs, the choice is yours.
what will you need
The star of the matter is USB OTG, the acronym Ready to gothe USB standard by which we can connect almost everything to our android mobile
The good news is that USB-OTG support has been a part of Android since Honeycomb, and while it’s still possible some manufacturers have disabled it for unknown reasons, It is quite common for any current mobile to support it. Nevertheless, you will need a cable to connect the flash drive.
You will need a USB OTG cable, either MicroUSB or USB-C, depending on your mobile’s connector
Obviously the flash drive cannot be directly connected to the mobile because it has a USB-A connector instead of USB-C or Micro USB. This is where you will need using a USB-OTG cable. If you don’t have one at home – and I personally recommend it if you like to play with your mobile – the good news is that they are quite cheap.
A USB-C USB-OTG cable can cost around 2.99 dollars, and a Micro USB OTG 2.50 dollars. Moreover, there are even OTG cables that are used for both USB-C and Micro USB, for 3.99 dollars. This is the list of everything what you will need
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An Android mobile that supports USB-OTG connections, which is usual
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A USB-OTG cable with the connectors of your mobile (if the mobile is “new”, it is probably USB-C)
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A USB key that you have at home
Plug in, connect and go
As you can see, the list of items you need for this experience is quite affordable, and best of all, the process is just as easy, if not more so. Basically you just need connect the cable to the mobile and the USB key to the cablenothing more.
If you have a USB-OTG cable, the process is as simple as connecting the cable to the mobile and the USB stick to the cable, without further ado.
You don’t need to use any official app or activate anything on mobile. By connecting it, it is very likely that a notification will appear on your mobile indicating that a USB device has been connected
The flash drive will be mounted as a system drive, so you should see in any file manager applicationwhere you can copy, move, delete and manage storage at will, just like you do with your mobile’s internal memory.
It’s unlikely, but if the flash drive is in an unsupported file format (such as NTFS), then you need to format it before using it, something you can probably do directly from the mobile itself. Then you already have your mobile-ready external memory that you can take anywhere.
This external memory can be useful if, for example, you are going to need to make a lot of long videos and you want to “export” them to copy them to another site (or simply save them without occupying all the memory of your mobile) , so easily and without the need for a PC. you just need take your cable and your USB key with youboth of which are very small.
