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[Tip] Mapping a drive to newer Android devices   [Tip]

By: Darren       
Date: Feb 14,2013 at 04:10

Recent versions of Android no longer allow you to map a drive to your device, and the only native method you have is MTP, which doesn't allow you to map a drive letter. Here is a method that I came up with as a decent workaround.

For this solution you need a samba (or ftp) server app that has the ability to bind to the "rndis0" USB tether adapter, instead of the default "wlan0" wifi adapter. The SambaDroid app does have this ability in its settings. This app does require root, so if you won't be able to have root on your device then you'll need to use a different app.

Here's how to do it:
1. Connect your Android device to your Windows PC via usb.
2. Enable USB tethering (in the Android system settings, in the networking section) and make sure Windows recognizes the USB Modem hardware for your device.
3. Launch SambaDroid and make sure its set to bind to rndis0, and then touch Start and make sure its got all green status.
4. In Windows Explorer, on the tools menu, map a network drive, and browse the Microsoft Windows Network to find the SAMBADROID share entry and map it.

Here is a chart I made to show the differences between the various access methods:
[image]
Some notes...
- When USB tethering is enabled and connected, your PC will send and receive all network data through your device, so make sure you don't have your 3G/4G data enabled, to avoid using your allowance.
- SambaDroid currently shows the wifi address, even though the rndis0 adapter is using a compeletely different address. To see the address that SambaDroid is bound to, you can open a cmd prompt on your pc and ping sambadroid, which will show you the address its using for samba/cifs. You can also use ipconfig /all and find the default gateway for the usb modem.
- There a many FTP server apps for Android, however ftp is typically slower than cifs at file transfers by about 20%, and its also quite slow at tree navigation too.
- On some flavors of Android 4.x (various ROMs) the MTP mode was very slow at tree navigation, but on others it was fast.
- I'd guess that a faster SD card would result in write speeds that better match the read speeds.
- I perforned all the throughput testing on my Samsung Galaxy S3, with Android 4.2.1, and an ADATA 32GB Class 10 SD card. For the UMS Mode testing I was using Android 4.0.4 and the "SGS3 Easy UMS" app to enable UMS mode. For all WiFi tests, I was connected (with full bars) on an 802.11n router at 72mbps, which would have a max speed of about 3.5 MB/s at that configuration. If I were connected at a full 150mbps rated speed, then the max would be about 7 MB/s, and the CIFS via WiFi speed should be about twice what I measured. And my PC was connected via 100mbps ethernet to the router.

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