External drives not compatible with tablets (or TVs)

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JohnD

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I have a budget Lenovo laptop with little storage, running windows 10, and thought I would get an external DVD writer or hard drive with USB connection and put documents and photos on it. I have stopped using my tower as it takes up too much room, but might go back to one.

I would prefer to treat my files as portable.

There are lots of drives on the market, but I see they are advertised as not compatible with phones, tablets or TVs.

Why might this be? I have TVs that can record on USB external hard drives.
 
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The drives that you are looking at may not be formatted in a way the TV can read. It would probably need to be FAT32. Even a USB 2.0 drive might arrive formatted as exFat. Older devices can’t read exFat. Windows won’t volunteer to format a drive larger than 32GB as FAT32. Most likely you will be offered only exFat and NTFS. Neither format is liable to be read by a TV or whatever it is.
 
Yes because a TV doesn't have the driver (know how to communicate with and use data from) the external DVD drive/writer.

No adapter will work either. The drive literally has one job; read from a disc and send it to a connected to device as bits. A conmected device needs to be able to understand the data coming in and then send it through some software on the machine that can then essentially put all the bits back together into a proper video that that can be displayed. No TV has that functionaiity. You would have to have some device that can take the data from the drive, then convert it to an actual video that can be outputted over HDMI, then plug that into the TV.
 
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The older hard drive is around ten years old, the other newer, I think the TVs formatted them. They also formatted some memory sticks, but they were inconveniently small and could not be recorded on one TV and read on the other (different ages, same make). I don't understand why a TV can read and write a USB hard drive but not a USB DVD drive.

It looks like the DVD drive is out of the question for TV.

For the laptop, I will try it.

Sorry I have been talking about hard drives and DVD writers on the same thread.

You think I should be able to use a USB hard drive on the laptop and also on a phone or tablet?
 
I might be wrong (I often am).... but I believe that if you record from a TV to a USB stick/etc/DVD, the manufacturer is legally obliged to decode the data so that you can't use it on another device.

From memory, Macrovision was one of the first anti-piracy tools. It was, I think, first introduced to stop people cloning VHS tapes and was later adopted for DVD.

Again, there are tools to get around it.
 
I have been known to, erm... acquire video from torrents... they are normally encoded in a format that can be displayed on other devices.
 
JohnD said:
You think I should be able to use a USB hard drive on the laptop and also on a phone or tablet?
Click to expand...
Yes, you can use it for your laptop, it's really easy to do.

For using it on a phone or a tablet,

USB type A in(to plug your hard drive.

USB C out (to plug into your phone/tablet, depends on what port your device has)
 
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