How to use your old hard drive on Android TV or Chromecast to give it new life
If you have an old hard drive at home, there are several ways you can use it. For example, you can use it on your Android TV devicewhether it is an HDD or an SSD. You will always need some type of adapter to connect it via USB, but when you do, the possibilities are many. In this article we are going to summarize the things you are going to need, and everything you need to take into account for this, to convert an HDD or SSD to an external hard drive that you can connect and add photos or videos to your Android TV, be able to play them on the TV, device connected to it or Chromecast, and much more. Know your hard drive, buy an enclosure If what you have is an old external hard drive, everything will be easy, and at most you will need to buy a cable that connects it via USB type C, or that converts USB-A to USB-C to adapt it to an Android TV if it does not have a large USB connector. But If it is a computer hard driveone of those wireless ones where you have the disk and that’s it, then you are going to need to buy a kind of case that has the necessary internal components and programs to be able to connect it to a device like Android TV. Come on, to turn it into a portable drive. But before looking for a case, you should know a couple of things. First you have to know if it is a HDD or SSDa large mechanical disc in the first case or one of the finest in the second. You also need to check if the connection is IDE as in the older ones, or SATA. You also have to know the size of your hard drive, which can normally be 2.5 or 3.5 inches depending on whether it is an SSD or HDD. These are data that you need to check on your own, since you will need all of them to later get the external adapter casing that suits you. Once you have everything clear, for non-external hard drives you only have to buy the case with the features you need. They are very cheapand depending on what you need, they can cost you from 8 to 20 euros depending on how you want them to be, although it is advisable to buy them in stores with free returns in case you make a mistake about something. Once you buy the one you want, you will only have to connect the hard drive into the caseand then connect this to your Android TV or your Chromecast. These are our recommendations: BENFEI 2.5″ Hard Drive Enclosure, USB C/A to Sata for 2.5 Inch USB 3.0 to SATA SSD (Optimized for SSD, Compatible with UASP SATA III) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Hard Drive Enclosure – 2.5 Inch IDE Parallel Port Mobile Hard Drive Enclosure High Speed Hard Drive Enclosure Screwless External Storage The price could vary. We earn commission from these links AISENS USB 3.1 GEN1 EXTERNAL 3.5 BOX FOR SATA III HARD DRIVES BLACK ASE-3530B The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Tooq TQE-3520B – Enclosure for 3.5″ HDD Hard Drives, (IDE, SATA I/II/III, USB 2.0), Aluminum with plastic support, LED indicator, Black, 350 g. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Format your hard drive When you connect your hard drive directly to your Android TV or Chromecast, the first thing you see is a message asking you to format it to be able to use it. This is something that is important to do, and if the device does not allow you to do it you will have to go by hand by connecting it to the PC and doing it there. When formatting it, it is advisable to choose the formats FAT32, NTFS or exFATwhich are the most popular. exFAT may not be compatible with some televisions, so if you want to watch large files such as movies it is best to opt for NTFS. What can you do with this hard drive Now you just need to start taking advantage of this disk to use it. To start, you can use it to store series, movies or music. You can save files directly to disk, and then access them from the native Android TV player or any player application you install. You can also do the same with photographs. Some set-top boxes or Android TV devices allow you record programs or broadcasts directly. In these cases, one of these hard drives will considerably increase the space you have available to do so. On Android TV you can also find the option to format this hard drive as internal storage. It is not an option always available, but when you have it, its storage will become like the internal one to install more applications or games inside, although these will go more slowly. Some apps will also allow you use the disk as a drive for downloads. This can happen to you in download managers or emulators, and in these cases you can take advantage of this disk. In fact, if you are going to use emulators it will be useful to save the ROMs to disk. In Xataka Basics | The computer does not recognize an external hard drive: what to do and how to solve it