Can I connect Surface RT and PC with USB cable?

Anonymous

I have a Toshiba Thrive running Android. I can connect it to my PC with a USB cable and access files on my Thrive on the PC. The PC treats the Thrive as a hard drive. Can I connect my Surface in the same way? I have tried and the PC does not appear to see the Surface.

This is a pain, one of the reasons I bought the Surface was to be able to do this type of hard connection and not have to use "iTunes" or the Cloud.

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Anonymous

Greetings SaeedR_706,

That is a good question, however I would suggest rather then using the USB cable, to transfer files over your WiFi network to a shared folder on your Windows 7 Laptop.

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Anonymous

Hello Rrccw,

No, you cannot connect the Surface to the PC via USB. However, you can setup Shared folderson your PC. Once you have that, have the Surface connect to the same network via WiFi and then go into Network from the Desktop app, select your PC and then see the Shared Folders. From there, the Surface should have Read/Write access if you gave the permissions on the PC.

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65 additional answers

Anonymous

2014-01-08T00:15:24+00:00

Have started the USB transfer of the same set of files. Windows initially estimated that it would take 12 minutes. 10% into the transfer it is estimating 18 minutes. Either way, it looks like taking a lot less than half the time of the wifi transfer, with the added benefit that it will not congest my network.
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Anonymous

2014-01-08T00:48:52+00:00

In the end it took 28 minutes by USB and 46 by wifi.
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Anonymous

2014-01-09T12:22:45+00:00
Just curious - what "super obvious" security risk could acting as a USB client add on a device that can already act as host to a USB drive?

Err...it means anyone can copy anything off of or on to your device, with zero security.

Thanks Wolfpup3 but the super obvious word that you missed in my question was "add". The surface already has a USB port which a USB drive can be attached to. That allows anything to be copied on or off the device, with zero security, other than entering the Surface pin. Host software can also be designed to require the PIN to be entered (I had that with my Blackberry), so acting as a host does not ADD any security risk.

There are perhaps two different points your raising here Brett.
1. Attaching a USB hard drive to a surface
2. Using a Surface as a USB hard drive
The first of these, as perhaps we all know, is perfectly possible. You can only copy data to this USB drive if you can access the surface via a PIN or password. This seems perfectly safe to me and is comparable to any PC, Mac or Linux machine.

The second is simply not possible. The Surface is not a USB drive and cannot be used like one. Granted some phones and tablets do allow this functionality and it's quite useful but they are not productivity devices in the same way that a Surface is. Therefore, a surface needs to have a higher level of protection and security for my use because it is a productivity device. If I thought for one second that somebody could plug the surface into their PC and have access to all the content on there as if it was a USB hard drive I would have to stop using it straight away.

Complexity in this case is our security friend.

Another workaround would simply to store all less sensitive information on the SD card and then use this to transport data from the Surface to another device.

I share your sense of irritation at WiFi being so slow...I think it's even slower in my house.
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