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February 13th, 2014 15:00

Dell Venue 8 Pro - USB External Drive does not show up in Explorer or Disk Manager

I have a Dell Venue 8 Pro.  I got a silicon Power Rugged armor A80 1 TB drive and a 3rd party Micro-USB adapter.  When I plug the drive in, it will show up in Device Manager without hesitation.  However it does not show up in Disk Manager so I can't see it in explorer, assign it a drive letter or format it.

I have an externally powered 1TB USB drive in a PC, when I plug that into the Venue it comes up.  When I take the Silicon Power drive and plug it into my PC, it comes right up and I can see the drive and the files on it.

Has anyone else had success with external USB drives, should I return the drive and try with another?

Thanks.

33 Posts

February 14th, 2014 07:00

The drive is powered via USB, and the V8P can't do that. It looks like that drive does not accept an AC adapter. You would have to use the cable with two USB connectors on one of the ends. These are used for USB 2.0 ports. When plugging into a USB 2.0 device it uses the power from 2 ports to give the device enough juice. So maybe if you can get that second USB connector plugged into another device with power it will work.

14 Posts

February 21st, 2014 19:00

Hi Fozman,


External USB Devices like Hard Drives and DVD RW need to have their own power supply as the Venue 8 Pro cannot supply enough power for the disks to spin up.

If you don't have externally powered devices, a solution I use is an externally powered USB Hub.

I produced a couple of videos on this subject on my blog for my community users that will help you.

http://internetschoolbus.com/?s=usb

Brian Collins

915 Posts

June 22nd, 2014 21:00

As noted above, some external drives connect just fine, others need to be connected with a powered USB hub as an intermediary (unfortunately), due to power draw issues. (And, unfortunately, that's the situation I have with a fairly "normal" portable hard drive from a major manufacturer.)

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