How to Connect USB Storage Devices to Your Android Phone

That phone in your pocket is essentially a miniature computer, and can do more than just make phone calls. Your Android phone uses its microUSB port for charging and transferring files back and forth with your PC.

Fortunately, with some free software and an inexpensive adapter cable, you can attach a USB key or card reader directly to your handset. Here's how to connect your Android phone to a USB storage device.





Collect your materials, what You Need to Connect USB Storage to Android Phones
• A USB OTG ("On the Go") cable with a male microUSB connector on one end and a female full size USB port on the other.

• A rooted Android phone: If your phone is not already rooted, you'll need to find specific instructions for your make, model and carrier. The Unlockr.com has easy-to-follow rooting tutorials for most the major Android phones from the past few years. The XDA developer forums have rooting instructions for almost every phone, but many of its posts can be difficult to understand.

You'll also need to download two apps. ES File Explorer and StickMount. You can also use other apps like this.

Plug in
Connect the OTG cable to your phone and attach the USB Flash Drive. Launch StickMount and then tap OK to mount the drive. You can also choose to have StickMount launch automatically every time a flash drive is connected.

The app will pop up an alert to let you know if the mounting was successful, and list the directory where you'll find your files in the file explorer app.

Start exploring
Fire up the file explorer app—ES File Explorer, in this case. Head tosdcard/usbStorage and look for the name of your flash drive. Tap it, and you should be able to see the files contained on the memory stick.

Now you can use flash drives to load things like movies, photos, and songs without transferring them over to your device's internal storage. You can also move over a batch of files from the flash drive to your device using the file explorer app.

If you find you're having issues getting the flash drive to show up in your file explorer application, try simply turning the phone on and off again after installing StickMount.
You'll know that the phone recognizes the USB drive when you see its name pop up in the accompanying popup dialog window (shown above).