If you have a TV that doesn’t offer smart features, buying a streaming media player is often a better buy in that regard, but you’ll also need to shell out a bit of cash for a Chromecast, Fire TV, or similar HDMI dongle. can give new life to your old TVIt is a much cheaper solution than buying a Smart TV.

These devices are also ideal for cases where you already have a Smart TV but the operating system it includes does not convince you. In general, Android-based devices will offer us much more freedombecause we will have access to a vast app library, multiple streaming content platforms, smart device control and more.

HDMI dongles and their shortcomings in terms of specifications

But despite all the advantages of these devices, They often fall short in terms of technical featuresAt least the most basic models. That is why we explained at the beginning of this article why it is advisable to buy the ‘4K’ versions of these devices, even if we do not have a television that supports this resolution.

One of these shortcomings is usually amount of internal storage available on the deviceIt makes it a torture for those most interested in these devices to install useful and necessary applications and add multimedia content locally.

But there is a very simple way to increase the amount of internal storage on your Chromecast or Fire TV: Expand via USB stick, SD card or external hard drive. Doing this just requires following a series of steps. Below these lines we tell you everything you need to do.

How to expand your Chromecast’s storage?

Chromecast with Google TV offers a USB-C input that is used to power the device. Although in some models we can connect Chromecast without external power and directly from the TV’s USB, this is not recommended. However, it is used to power the device and expand your storage with an external drive via a Hub.

So if you have a Hub with multiple USB ports in your home, You can both power your Chromecast and add more storage External (if your Hub allows it), including SD cards, USB flash drives, or external hard drives.

Note that the Hub you buy must have a USB-C socket to connect your Chromecast’s power cable directly from the Hub to the light socket, so you don’t have to rely on a lot of adapters and incompatibilities.

After completing the entire installation, we must go to the settings section of our device and log in. System > Storage. You should already see your extra storage here, you can use it for anything. Of course, keep in mind that you will need to format the drive in a format supported by your Chromecast. You can do this from the same storage tab, where among the options you will find “wipe and format as device storage”.

Please click on this option, Everything inside the drive will be deletedIt is therefore important to have a backup copy of all your saved data.

In this way, your extra storage unit is already ready to use. However, you can also combine both the device memory and the external drive to combine them. To do this, enter the external storage unit from the settings panel and select “Move data to this storage”. This way, you can download and install applications on this unit, as well as add local multimedia content from your library and much more.

How to expand your Fire TV Stick’s storage?

For the Amazon device the concept will be very similar to what we did with the Chromecast, that is we will use a Hub or adapter with several USB sockets to power our device. and also connect an extra storage unit.

So, once you’ve added your connector to a few USB sockets using the Micro USB connector that came with your Fire TV Stick, you simply connect the USB power cable and your extra storage to each of them.

What is normal is that Fire TV does not recognize your external storage at first, so it is probably When starting up the Fire TV Stick, the system will ask you to format the driveThis will erase everything on your flash drive, so save all your data before continuing.

After formatting the memory, go to: My Fire TV > About > Storage You will notice that your Fire TV will now recognize your external storage. If you want to move apps that are currently installed on your device’s internal storage to the external storage drive, you will need to do so manually using a third-party file manager like X-Plore File Manager as we mentioned in this article.

If you want to see all the apps you have installed on your external storage drive, go to: My Fire TV > USB Drive and select ‘Manage installed applications‘. In the ‘Show’ option you will only be able to see what you have uploaded to the external drive.

Having extra storage on your Fire TV also means organizing it so that it doesn’t use up the device’s internal memory and stores the rest on an external drive.

In Xataka Smart Home | Fire TV Stick works best without these settings: this way you can completely isolate your device and ensure that nothing disturbs you.