How to connect USB flash drives to Nexus 7

One of the main disadvantages of Google Nexus 7 tablet – is it has no microSD card slot. There are many HD-video and some games and apps having size of 4 GB or more, so you may face the memory space problem, and the problem is very serious especially for those who purchased Nexus 7 8GB version. Moreover adding a MicroSD slot to nexus 7 tablet is physically impossible. So, if you want to run files stored on external drive you need to connect USB flash drives to Nexus 7 tablet via USB cable.

How to connect USB flash drives to Nexus 7

To connect USB flash drives to Nexus 7, you required following things:

• Rooting
• USB OTG cable
• Stickmount application
• USB flash drive/Hard drive

Step 1:

First of all you must root Nexus 7 Jelly Bean tablet which is a very simple procedure. By using Cyanogenmod application you can root it easily. It’s available free to download. Click here to download Latest Cyanogenmod.

Step 2:

USB OTG – adapter cable: Using this you can connect any peripheral devices like flash-drive, keyboard, mouse, etc.

Step 3:

You must download the Stickmount application from the Google Play Market, which was created specifically for the Nexus 7. With this application you can mount USB flash drives on the tablet. After installing and running the Stickmount application, a graphical window of Stickmount will appear which shows different options.

With the help of Mount and Unmount option you can enable or disable the flash drive. The remaining options are used to configure the program: shutdown and connection notification on the use of USB flash drives, as well as the use of UTF-8.

Once the flash drive is mounted, you can easily browse its contents which can be done by any file manager. To do this, you need to locate the address: / sdcard / usbStorage / xxx /.

That’s all. After you connect a USB flash drive or external hard drive to Google Nexus 7 tablet, it can be used as a mobile media player with external storage media.

Watch the video how to connect USB flash drive to Google Nexus 7 tablet :

A small addition:

Stickmount application was created and specially optimized for the Google Nexus 7 Jelly Bean OS tablet, but you can use this application on devices like Smartphones/Tablets running on ICS or on Android 3.1 OS and higher.