I'll show you how to view and download files on an external drive and which types of files types and file systems Chrome OS can recognize. Using an external storage device with a Chromebook takes a little more work on your part. provides a quick way to view its contents. lets you know the system has recognized whatever it is that you connected to it, and B. You won't see a helpful prompt or a new desktop icon that, A. When you connect an external drive or SD card to your Chromebook, however, nothing happens. Same deal with photos - instead of storing photos locally, Google Photos, Flickr or another cloud service.Ĭhromebooks feature USB ports and SD card slots, however, which let you connect to external storage devices for those times when you need to access a file that you have saved not to the cloud but an external hard drive, thumb drive or SD card. Instead of a large music library stored locally in iTunes, you are meant to use Google Play or Spotify. So, instead of storing a bunch of Word docs and Excel files on a Chromebook, for example, you are meant to use Google Drive or Dropbox. Chromebooks are built with cloud storage in mind and offer a pittance of local storage - usually only 32GB or 64GB.
