Thumb drives but no hard disk?

[MAgentieri]

I think I read in here somewhere that the USB ports won't recognize external HDDs. Any truth to this rumor, or was the HDD formatted in ntfs rather than fat32?

 

[c1oudrs]

I think maybe? You are correct there's no guarantees that the Redfly will recognize nonthumbdrive hardrives. However, I wanted to say that the Redfly's drivers are in my opinion the most agressive windows mobile drivers on the market today. I actually found that the that the Redfly could access my external hard drive, when the setup I had with my HTC Advantage 3in1 cable/drivers could not. Someone posted that the Redfly recognized their ipod as a hard drive if I'm not mistaken. And I personally got the Redfly to recognize the sd and cf card on a Dell Axim x51v with the help of card export program on the Axim. My point is that the Redfly's drivers are NOT xp quality but tfor winddows mobile they are very very good,

 

[c1oudrs]

What I'm trying to say is that you are taking your chances but that the odds of the Redfly recognizing a small external hard drive are pretty good from what I've seen. Maybe I just got lucky.

 

[c1oudrs]

so yes, unofficially speaking, some hard drives will be recognized by the redfly. And the redfly wil recognize those harddrives when other window mobile solutions will not recognize those hard drives.

 

[Ebag333]

It's not the Redfly that has to support it, it's your device.

If your device can read it directly, then the Redfly may be able to as well.

Remember, the Redfly is simply your device running on the system. There is some firmware on there for managing things like the USB hub, but ultimately your device has to support it.

 

[RC46]

I'm going to try this out tonight when I get home. I will report back.

You dont think there is any chance it could corrupt the drive, do you?

 

[c1oudrs]

Ebagg333 is essentially correct, Yet, we Advantage owners (Advantage not officially supportedby Celio) are in a unique position in that the Advantage has a 3in1 cable that natively supports usb out. Our 3in1 cable will support thumbdrives but usually wll not suppport hardrive except for a very few. However with the Redfly I can recognize drives that I never could recognize before.

 

[c1oudrs]

Same device. Greater usb drive recognition with the Redfly.

 

[Ebag333]

However with the Redfly I can recognize drives that I never could recognize before.

The only reason I could think for that is that the USB hub in the Redfly is acting either as some sort of intermediary driver, or it's causing the phone or the drive to recognize differently.

For example if you plug your drive directly into the phone, the phone may be trying to use a SD card driver to read the drive. When you plug it in via the USB hub on the Redfly, the phone recognizes it as a generic removable media.


These sort of situations will tend to be fairly few and far between....which is why I always tell people that if it works with their phone it will probably work with the Redfly. 9 times out of 10 the Redfly isn't going to make something that did not work suddenly start working.

 

[RC46]

Well I tried several external USB2 drives tonight. All of them power up fine but Windows mobile 6.1 cant see them. I did manage to get a USB CF card reader to work with a 64gb CF card.

 

[c1oudrs]

Certainly the Redfly is limited by the hardware it is hooked up to. And Im not sayng that everyone will get the same results I did.

However so far with the Redfly and the HTC Advantage (Advantage using a beta driver, Avantage not officially supported by Celio), I've gotten the following which I could not get with the usb out on the Advantage 3in1 cable usb solution alone:
2 keyboards
2 mice
1 hard drive
Cf and sd card on Dell Axim x51v running card export

However the Redfly seems to interfere with blue input program (formerly bluemouse). Also using the Redfly usb, I was able to read cf cards on the multicard readers with about the same frequency as with the Advantage 3in1 solution (one worked, two did not) . I also understand that some people got usb mice working on the advantage using 3rd party xda developer drivers, all my tests were without 3rd party drivers.

Conclusion: while the affectiveness of Celio's usb solution likely varies widely from device to device, and is certainly not as good as xp in any case, I was and am impressed.

Same device, 2 different usb solutions, a MUCH better usb experience with the Redfly.

 

[c1oudrs]

rc46, what kind of usb cf card reader are you using? The only cf reader I've been able to get working is on a usb hub combo (no name brand) a big black square thing which isn't very convenient.

 

[RC46]

rc46, what kind of usb cf card reader are you using? The only cf reader I've been able to get working is on a usb hub combo (no name brand) a big black square thing which isn't very convenient.

Its a SanDisk device.