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iPad Pro What flash drive can I use with iPad Pro?

D

dmcnickle

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 29, 2015
32
19
Kansas
I do a lot of photo art and digital art on my iPad Pro. I have GBs and GBs of elements, textures and other design files that I do not want to keep on my 128GB iPad Pro because I will run out of room. Right now I keep maybe half of them on my iPP loaded into Photos. I know many would object to using Photos but right now it works for me. I can sync between my MacBook, my iPP and my iPhone. I have everything organized into albums and folders. I do have some in my dropbox but it is really a pain to use.
Is using an external flash drive with the lightning connector or wireless an option? How easy/hard is it to view the files on the flash drive? Are the files saved to my image library when I want to use one? Can I use the external drive like an external drive on my MacBook, meaning if I want to open one of the images on the flash drive in an app on my iPP, can I navigate to the drive or do I have to "save" the image file to "images" on my iPP?
I hope my questions make sense.
Thank you for the help.
 
I have a Leef iBridge, which has a USB 3 connector and a Lightning connector (http://www.leefco.com/ibridge). It has a companion app that interfaces with storage on iOS (since you don't have a file system), and the USB 3 side is great for fast transfers from a computer. Downside? Not very price efficient :(
 
I have the Leef iAccess and the company has said it is having problems with some micro SD cards > 32GB, to which I can attest - I have 3 64GB cards which cause their app to crash when some unknown limit is reached. I'm sticking with my RAVPower FileHub through which I can wirelessly access any USB storage device. File manager apps can generally see and access the USB storage.
 
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sparksd said:
I attach a 1TB or 2TB USB portable hard drive to it.
Click to expand...
That's two things to carry around, two points for possible failure as opposed to just one using the 2 TB options mentioned above.

Not to mention some of the options I posted are smaller than your option.

Through your own admission above one of your previous options, the Leef iAccess, has failed you.

Just to be clear, I do like the Filehub and will order one.
It's appears to be a good solution for Flash Drives and SD card situations.
 
sinsin07 said:
That's two things to carry around, two points for possible failure as opposed to just one using the 2 TB options mentioned above.

Through your own admission above one of your previous options, the Leef iAccess, has failed you.

Just to be clear, I do like the Filehub and will order one.
It's appears to be a good solution for Flash Drives and SD card situations.
Click to expand...

True, but I've been using this setup for about two years now (I used an earlier incarnation of the FileHub before this newest version) without a problem. Been using portable HDDs for years and never had one fail (knock on wood). For photo backup on travel, I use this combo to copy from SD to HDD but also keep the photos on the SD cards so I always have 2 copies. The iAccess didn't work from day one and sits in a drawer unused (I though it would be a convenient small device to use).
 
sparksd said:
True, but I've been using this setup for about two years now (I used an earlier incarnation of the FileHub before this newest version) without a problem. Been using portable HDDs for years and never had one fail (knock on wood). For photo backup on travel, I use this combo to copy from SD to HDD but also keep the photos on the SD cards so I always have 2 copies. The iAccess didn't work from day one and sits in a drawer unused (I though it would be a convenient small device to use).
Click to expand...
Thanks for posting link to Amazon, it appears to be well worth the money and I will order shortly.
 
sinsin07 said:
Thanks for posting link to Amazon, it appears to be well worth the money and I will order shortly.
Click to expand...

Hope it works for your needs. One other thing on the iAccess - not apps other than the Leef app can see the storage because of the interface but with the FileHub I can use FileBrowser to access it (and the RAVPower app, too) and other file mgmt apps can see the USB storage (though other apps can't - thanks to Apple's sandbox approach).
 
Does anyone use the Sandisk Connect with their iPad?

How easy/hard is it to view the files on the flash drive?
Are the files saved to my image library when I want to use one?
Can I use the Sandisk like an external drive on my MacBook, meaning if I want to open one of the images on the flash drive in an app on my iPP, can I navigate to the drive or do I have to "save" the image file to "images" on my iPP?
 
dmcnickle said:
Does anyone use the Sandisk Connect with their iPad?

How easy/hard is it to view the files on the flash drive?
Are the files saved to my image library when I want to use one?
Can I use the Sandisk like an external drive on my MacBook, meaning if I want to open one of the images on the flash drive in an app on my iPP, can I navigate to the drive or do I have to "save" the image file to "images" on my iPP?
Click to expand...

The way all of these devices operate is that after establishing a WiFi connection with the device, you use an app supplied by the vendor to access the files on the storage element. These apps provide the capability to view a number of different formats, including JPEG photos. So using their app you can directly view the image without actually copying it to your IPP. Alternatively, a file manager app like FileBrowser can usually act like the vendor's app and directly access the storage and view the image without copying it.

Viewing files with these things is generally pretty straight forward; it gets more complicated when you want to use other apps to use files on the storage device - you can end up with multiple copies of a file on your IPP because of having to go through intermediate handoffs between the apps and the storage device. e.g., Pages cannot directly access the storage device so it must be provided a copy via the vendor's app. To get it from Pages to the storage device, Pages has to copy it to the vendor's app which then can be used to copy it to the storage device.
 
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dmcnickle said:
Thank you very much for your detailed reply. It helps me a lot.
Click to expand...

Glad it helped. I also wanted to note that the path among apps and external storage I described does not always exist. One example is MS Word - I can't find a way to get a document from Word to the vendor app for putting on the storage device (I can go the other way though). I could do it by using the Cloud, I believe, but I'm looking for a Cloud-free solution. Moral of the story - if you need a file to travel the path both ways (storage->iPad->storage), you better first check that the return path exists.
 
sparksd said:
Moral of the story - if you need a file to travel the path both ways (storage->iPad->storage), you better first check that the return path exists.
Click to expand...

I never thought about that. More to think about when deciding what to use.
 
To follow up on my comments above about the Leef iAccess device - after going through two replacements provided by Leef and updates of the firmware and the app, I will be returning it for a refund. It would just never work correctly, with the app crashing on accessing files on the microSD card (I tried multiple cards). They said it appears to be "incompatible with my iPad (Air 2)". Nice idea but a flawed implementation. I'll stick to using my RAVPower FileHub - it worked great on a recent trip to a remote area in Alaska where Internet service was unavailable - I used it for streaming some video and for backing up photos from my camera.
 
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