Help Media Dock/External USB Hard Drive

[tjury81]

I'm trying to hook up an external hard drive (Seagate Slim 500gb STCD500104) to my stock Verizon Galaxy Note 2 via the Samsung Galaxy Smart Dock. The Seagate Slim comes stock as NTFS which was only recognized as a blank USB drive by the phone. I formatted to exFat and had the same effect. I downloaded Seagate's DiscWizard and formatted to Fat32 and still couldn't read the drive. I can read each file format on my PC so I know that the formatting worked, and I have the Smart Dock connected to power, but I don't know if I need a different hard drive or what. Any ideas?

 

[Munky78]

I tried connecting an iomega portable 2.5" drive using a usb otg cable and it kept saying damaged storage an unmounting. It was formatted as exfat and works fine on my windows 8 machine.

 

[NeoGrandizer]

Did you try applying additional power to the external drive to see if it worked? There are USB y-cables available that provide data and additional power if needed. It could be the drive is power hungry and requires a bit more power to work properly. I have a 2.5" 1TB drive in an enclosure that works fine with my Note 2 and Smart dock. I also had a 500GB drive in the same enclosure that worked. The 500GB was in FAT32/exFAT and the 1TB in exFAT. The only time it failed was if I had the drive partitioned.

Edit: The Smart Dock still requires external power to power the external HDD enclosure to work properly. Regardless if has MHL connected or not. I forgot I was using powered USB hub on top as I have a mouse and keyboard connected with it.

I only used enclosures since I can swap out drives when needed and work from there. In all cases, it works fine even with drives swapped out.

 

[tjury81]

I'm seeing a common thread on other sites mentioning that the power coming into the Multimedia Dock isn't enough to fully power the USB drives since most of the power is going into the phone. I'll try getting a y-cable since the hard drive seems to be acting normally even though its power light stays lit the entire time it is connected to the dock. Maybe enough power for the light and basic connection but not enough to fully access the drive. Is it better to go exFat or FAT32?

 

[NeoGrandizer]

Is it better to go exFat or FAT32?

exFAT is better as it doesn't have the large file restrictions like FAT32.

Sorry, the y-cable method doesn't work. I forgot I had a powered USB hub connected to it. I only used the dock on its own for the USB sticks, but not an actual external HDD. I just tried connecting my external HDD again without the powered hub and found it needed more power than what the dock could provide. The drive just didn't exist and only HDMI output was working.