How to Format External Hard Drive for Smasung Smart TV Easily?

What format does external hard drive need to be for Samsung TV?

A Smart TV is a traditional television set with integrated Internet and interactive Web 2.0 features, allowing users to stream music and videos, browse the internet, and view photos on the TV. Samsung Smart TV is one of the popular Smart TVs nowadays, offering you access to a world of content beyond streaming so that you can schedule recordings, search and game all while connecting to more devices across your home.

Sometimes, you might want to connect an external hard drive to the Samsung Smart TV in order to play games, view photos, watch videos stored on the hard drive. Then you should format the external hard drive to a compatible file system for the Samsung Smart TV. Otherwise, you might meet the problem “Samsung Smart TV USB drive not working”. In general, Samsung Smart QLED and SUHD TVs support FAT, exFAT, and NTFS file systems. Full HD TVs support NTFS (Read Only), FAT16 and FAT32.

Of course, you can check the exact supported Samsung Smart TV file systems by taking the following steps:
1. Open "settings" option and access to "supports".
2. Open "instructions" and navigate to "notes and instructions".
3. Then skip to "must read before playing photo, video, or music files" to check out the supported Samsung smart TV USB format, video format, image format, and audio format.

How to format external hard drive for Samsung Smart TV?

After knowing the proper Samsung Smart TV external hard drive format, now it’s time to format the external hard drive to the compatible file system. Basically, you can finish this formatting task in Disk Management, DiskPart or File Explorer. However, if your external hard drive is over 32GB, you won’t be able to format it to FAT32 with the traditional methods.

To ensure a smooth formatting process, here, we recommend you use the free partition manager-AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. It can perform lots of tough formatting jobs that Windows 11/10 native tools cannot. For example, it is able to format 32GB+hard drive to FAT32, format internal hard drive to exFAT, format drive with corrupted file system, format drive to Ext4, Ext3 and Ext2, etc.

To format external hard drive for Samsung Smart TV, you had better back up files on the drive because formatting will erase everything on it. Then connect the external hard drive to your PC, download the freeware, and follow the tutorial:

Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard on your computer. Right click the external hard drive and select “Format Partition”.

Step 2. In the pop-out window, choose the proper file system (FAT32, exFAT, NTFS or other supported file system you check in the “must read” part) and click “OK”.

Step 3. Back to the main interface, click “Apply” to commit the pending operation.

After it is done, you can restore the backup made before to the external hard drive. Then you can connect the external hard drive to your Samsung Smart TV to see whether if it is recognized by the TV.

▸▸You may be interested in...
AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard develops the “NTFS to FAT32 Converter”, which allows you to convert file systems between FAT32 and NTFS without reformatting the hard drive again. So if you want to format the external hard drive from FAT32 to NTFS or NTFS to FAT32 for Samsung Smart TV, you can try this converter.

Extra tips on connecting external disk to Samsung Smart TV

Since more users want to stream their videos or games on their Samsung Smart TV from the external hard drive, here we would like to share extra tips on connecting external disk to Smart TV.

▶QLED and SUHD TVs support MSC (Mass Storage Class) USB devices only including external hard drives, flash card readers, and digital cameras. (USB hubs are not supported.)

▶Mass Storage Class USB devices must be connected directly to the USB port. If it is connected with a USB extenstion cable, the TV may not be able to recognize it or read the inside files.

▶For Full HD TVs, Media Play only supports USB Mass Storage Class devices. And it should also be connected directly to the TV’s USB port.

▶If several USB devices have been connected to the TV, some of them might not be recognized. The USB device that uses the high-power input should be connected to the USB [5V, 1A] port.

Conclude

After reading this post, now you should know the proper Samsung Smart TV external hard drive format and how to format your external hard drive to the compatible file system. Moreover, the free AOMEI Partition Assistant software also comes with many other features such as clone partition, move partition, merge partitions and more.

If you upgrade to Professional edition, you can enjoy more advanced functions: align SSD partition to improve its reading and writing performance, safely erase Samsung SSD drive, convert SSD to MBR or GPT without deleting partitions/losing data, change Samsung SSD serial number and so on.