Wireless external drive with iPad 1?

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Level 1

8 points

Wireless external drive with iPad 1?

Hello everyone. In the past I set up a laptop for my parents that has iTunes on it and connects to an external drive where I put all of their music, their speaker system connects to the laptop through the audio jack. Due to a furniture change, the laptop is a bit too bulky to be practical, but my mom has an iPad 1 lying around that she never really used much.

I wanted to replace the laptop with that iPad, but in order to do so, I need to be able to connect an external hard drive to the iPad. Unless I am mistaken, the only way to go about doing that is to do so wirelessly. Can that work? Have a wireless external drive holding the iTunes library for the iPad? Would my parents be able to buy music on iTunes and have it, by default, be stored on the external drive?

Posted on Dec 1, 2013 2:31 AM

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Answer 1

AmishCake

Level 6

9,648 points

Dec 1, 2013 6:45 AM in response to Ravich

The answer to your questions is NO, you can't directly connect an iPad to a wireless hard drive - that is, unless there is one currently for sale that has an app still compatible with the iPad 1st gen. I wouldn't replace the laptop just yet.

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Answer 2

Dec 1, 2013 8:28 AM in response to Ravich

There are wireless hard drives you can connect to an iPad (given that the apps required to access them will work on an older version of the iOS). However, they're only useful for streaming content from the device. You can't buy music on the iPad and have it saved to the drive. You can't transfer media from the drives to the music player. Most of them have software with built in players.

Kingston makes some small ones. Seagate makes some. You can look at reviews if you just search Amazon for "iPad hard drive".

Best of luck.

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Answer 3

Ravich Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 1, 2013 2:15 PM in response to IdrisSeabright

Thanks for the responses. I have a couple more questions based on this.

None of the iPads seem to have physical ports for connecting an external drive, so do any of the other iPads (2 or air) have the capability to interface with a wireless hard drive both reading and writing?

If not, is it possible to do so with a macbook air? Just trying to get an idea of what the options are.

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Answer 4

Ravich Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 1, 2013 5:50 PM in response to Ravich

Actually, new question. Since this iPad 1 has 30 gigs of storage space, I'm thinking that it'll be fine if the music is saved to the internal SSD. That being said, would it actually be possible to have the iPad read from a library on a wireless external drive and also accessing music on its own internal drive. I know I could do it on OSX, but I dont know what the limitations of iOS iTunes are.

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Answer 5

deggie

Level 10

167,525 points

Dec 1, 2013 5:56 PM in response to Ravich

There is no accessible file system in iOS. As said above the only thing you can do with the WiFi hard drive is to stream media (normally movies) to the iPad. And you do not have iTunes on the iPad, you have a Music app and a Movies app to play material.

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