Use floppy disks to expand your smartphone storage (just for fun!)

We never have enough storage on our smartphones. We are taking too many photos, creating too many videos and we want to carry our entire music collections with us. I have a great solution, floppy disks! Probably you've got an old box of them down in your basement or in your loft. Why not make use of them?

In the above photo you can see it actually works. Here's what you need:

• A smartphone that supports OTG (On-The-Go)
• I tested this with an Android phone only, I don't know if the iPhone ca, if you know please write in the comments below.
• An OTG dongle (in my case it's that green thing in the above photo, you can easily buy these, they are not expensive, just search on Amazon or eBay for OTG and you'll find one)
• External USB floppy disk drive
• At least one floppy disk (more than one recommended!)

As each 3.5" floppy disk has just 1.44MB of storage space you will need a lot of floppies! ;-)


Just for fun!
Obviously (I hope!) this isn't practical. It was experimenting and I was happy to discover that it works! I was able to copy files to/from the floppy disk. It was funny listening the drive making that iconic zrhk zhrk noise. I think it's rather fast too, relatively speaking.


Seriously speaking
Instead of floppies disks, use OTG and plug in a USB flash drive. That will give you lots of expandable storage that is usable and practical. If you are interested in learning more you can find many demos on Youtube, just search for OTG.

Another real-world application of OTG is to make backups of photos. The following is an article I wrote about this:
https://mgxp.blogspot.ch/2015/06/backup-your-photos-on-go.html


Conclusion
OTG is very useful. It's also fun to dig out some old tech and get it to work with modern day kit. Enjoy technology!