Need to connect WD My Passport drive to my Windows 8.1 tablet, which has a mini USB connection. Is there a specific cable, or some other way to do this? Thanks.
Hello,
I have never tried a USB adapter since they are not supported. Lets see if another user has tried one before and can share his experience with us.
There are various ways, but it will depend a little on the tablet itself.
The simplest way is a simple micro-USB to USB cable, but that will need the tablet to be able to accept input via the micro-USB port (USB-on-the-go), and also that it can provide enough power via that port to actually power the MyPassport. You can pick up those cables quite cheaply from Amazon or similar.
It is fairly likely that the tablet should be able to take data via the micro-USB port unless it’s designed just for charging (the specification of the tablet should tell you that - what type of tablet actually is it?) but the powering one may well be not supported, or not supported properly. You’d need a powered hub as well then, which gets very complex and will of course tether your tablet and drive to a power supply (generally not so good a solution).
In that case an alternative is something like a Ravpower Filehub, which is a wifi hotspot and battery (and a few other things) which you can plug the MyPassport into and then access it via the devices wifi hotspot. I use one with a MyPassport and my (Android) Nexus 7, and it works fine. The sharing is via SMB so I guess Windows 8.1 should also support it.
Hi, my tablet is an ASUS windows tablet with an atom processor 1.33. What is the name of the cable? Tried to search for one on Amazon, but didn’t know a good name of the cable to search for. Any ideas?
A USB-on-the-go cable (one of these).
We need more detailed information (what model of Asus tablet, ideally a link to a web page showing it and its specs) to confirm if it supports OTG or not. Almost all tablets do, but it’s always worth checking.
But my suspicion would be that the micro-USB port won’t give enough power to run the MyPassport, so you’d either need a powered hub in there too, or a solution like the Ravpower Filehub I mentioned above.
