The iPhone has undoubtedly become a small computer that we all carry in our pockets. One of the tasks that can be performed is to easily manage and edit files. Obviously, it is possible to connect different storage units to work with these files. In this article we tell you everything you need to know about this connection.
Lightning connector limitations
Although the Ligthning connection has been present in the iPhone for several generations, this is not perfect. When connecting an external storage unit you may encounter different problems to visualize the content that you have to keep in mind. The main problem lies in the amount of power that the iPhone can provide to a storage unit . Not being able to provide a lot of energy, there is a limitation at the storage level. This is why you will never see external hard drives with a Lightning connection, these units are limited to very little storage.
If you want to choose to connect external hard drives with several GB of storage or transfer at a much higher speed, you must use an adapter that supports a power input. This way you can recharge your computer while transferring files. These do not have a very high price and will allow you to have much more versatility when using these units.
Lightning Adapters
As we discussed earlier, if you connect the USB key or the hard drive through Lightning and the computer does not recognize it, you must use an adapter. These adapters are very versatile as they allow you to go from the Lightning connection to a typical USB-A connection . On Amazon you can find some of these adapters that in addition to including the USB-A connection also adds card readers. In addition, as mentioned above, a power input is included to be able to recharge the device at the same time and provide enough power to the adapter.
Obviously the data transfer speeds are not too good. Even if there is an adapter, the Lightning connection is still present and this will largely determine the transfer speed. In the case that it was a USB-C connection the thing would be quite different since a much higher transfer is included. To be much more exact, the transfer in these cases would be up to 16 MB / s .
View documents on iPhone
In order to view the contents of a storage unit, you can use the Files application that is natively installed on iOS. By accessing this application on the left side you can view the storage unit that has been recognized by the iPhone. By clicking on it you can enter all the folders you have created and transfer documents or multimedia files between the unit and the internal storage of the iPhone.
But obviously it does not only work to transfer files from the USB stick to the iPhone, it also goes in the opposite direction. This is ideal to be able to comfortably work with files between different computers if you do not want to go through the Apple cloud, either for security or portability because there is not always internet everywhere.
