Paragon Android app lets you play with external HDDs

The Paragon Software Group is well-known for its hard drive management tools so it comes to no surprise that they’ve ventured into the popular sea of Android devices.

Paragon app for Android lets users access files stored in almost any kind of external media device without having to do a lot of tinkering — other than rooting your device as a prerequisite.

While hooking up an external hard disk drive is certainly doable on the Nexus 7 tablet (we’re not sure about Android 4.1 on the Galaxy Nexus though, we haven’t tried it yet) and the Motorola Lapdock, owners of regular Android smartphones often have to go through a lot of hacking and kernel modding just to get the same thing done which doesn’t always end up being successful.

Key features:

● Full read/write access: Existing files can be read, modified or deleted, while new files can be created or copied.
● Special app allows to easily mount any NTFS or HFS+partition like a native one.
● Non-Roman characters and languages: File and folder names in national languages, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian.
● No system degradation during data transfers.
● No limitation to maximum file/partition size.

The app is still in beta release so there are still a lot of polishing that’s needed to be done, also, the app requires root access and a USB on-the-go cable (full-sized female to male micro USB adapter) as well as an externally powered portable HDD, since we doubt if our Android smartphones can supply the power required to spin the magnetic platters.

We’ve given the app a try but it couldn’t detect our Freecom XS for some reason, we don’t think it’s an application-related issue. we’re guessing it’s the drive itself since plugging the XS on our laptops sometimes showed the awful ‘USB Device not recognized’ message. Go try it for yourselves though, you can download it through Google Play for free.

{via}