Google designed Chrome OS as a lightweight, secure platform for laptops, meaning Chromebooks didn’t initially need much storage space. Now that they’re powered by Android, the limited storage space can be a problem. To fix that, here’s how to use Chromebooks with external storage, whether it’s an external hard drive or a memory card.
How to Set Up an External Hard Drive on a Chromebook Computer – Full Setup
The whole idea behind Chrome OS was to create a platform that supported web-based apps. You didn’t have to download and install these apps, which took up relatively little space on the Chromebook’s local drive. Instead, the internal storage hosted the operating system and your files.
Now that Google Play is coming to most modern Chromebooks, Android apps go straight to internal storage, meaning you’ll need additional space to store your downloaded media, photos, and files. That’s where external storage comes in.
These are the supported file systems, according to Google:
