How to connect a thumb/flash drive to Xiaomi phone running MIUI V5 ?

You can attach a thumb/flash drive to your Xiaomi phone to transfer files between them.

To do this, you’ll need an OTG cable (USB 2.0 A Female to Micro B Male) to connect both the flash drive and phone.

Here’s how :

1. Using a OTG cable, connect both your Xiaomi phone and flash drive.
   
2. To confirm that your Xiaomi phone recognizes the flash drive, you can go to the Settings app > Storage, and make sure you see the disk information, and Unmount USB storage and Erase USB storage options enabled in the External USB Storage section.
   
3. Now, you can find and launch the Explorer app.
4. Use its copy & paste function to transfer files between the phone storage, SD card and flash drive.
   

Note: I’ve tested with a flash drive formatted with FAT32, NFTS and exFAT. Both of my Mi 3 and Redmi only recognized flash drive with FAT32.

Note: The steps here were written for a Xiaomi device running MIUI V5. If you’re having a different version of MIUI, there’s a possibility that the steps and screenshots will be different.