原创 Boost smartphone storage thru external drive?

Hello Max, Happy New Year to you and thanks for all the information you send out to us. This is my first personal mail to you, although I have been your close and constant follower for a long time now. I will take time to tell you more about my electronic abilities later, but I am from the old school, where, if a transistor, diode, resistor, or capacitor failed, you soldered it out of the board, as compared to today's process of replacement of entire boards when they fail. Now you know my background a little bit.

I use my LG - E400 phone for everything, and a thought came that maybe I could attach an external hard drive to it via USB. I tried, but the drive did not turn on, probably for lack of sufficient battery power in the phone to drive it.

How much battery does a USB external hard drive require to run? In my mind, I am thinking I should be able to insert a small enough rechargeable battery on the inside of the external drive so that my phone can read it as a drive. In my hand is a rechargeable Li-Ion battery of capacity 3.7V at 900mAh that I salvaged from an iPod. The challenge is how to ensure I do not cook the hard drive and/or the phone when I USB the two together (i.e., phone power + 3.7V from the li-Ion battery).

This might sound crazy and not worth trying, but it is a learning process for me and I would really appreciate your thoughts on it if you have the time.

I immediately emailed Abraham back saying that I didn’t have a clue (this is pretty much true of most things), but that I would pose the question to the rest of the community.

I also suggested that it might be easier to simply connect his phone to his main computer and have done with it. Abraham responded that he often travels to remote locations where he doesn't have his computer; also that he has quite a lot of data to which he'd like access, and that his thought was that the combination of his smartphone (which he always carries) and a small external hard drive might do the trick.

So, over to you -- what do you think about this scheme -- is it workable at all? If so, would a hard disk drive (HDD) be the way to go, or would a Solid State Drive (SSD) offer any advantages?