At this time, the WD TV product line does not support the use of single USB drives larger than 2 TB. Doing so may cause corruption to the data, or damage to the partition. Our dual and network drives larger than 2 TB’s can continue to be used with the WD TV products. WD is currently working on a remedy to this situation, and will notify our customers when it becomes available.
This issue has been resolved for the WD TV Live, Live Plus, and the Live Hub in the latest firmware update.
What I have done with my 3 TB drive was to create 2 partitions (1.5 TB each, labelled PART1 and PART2). It seems to be working fine on both my WDTV Live and my WDTV Live Hub.
Once I select “USB2”, I get two options “PART1” and “PART2”. Then once I select either partition, then I get the proper directory structure.
Since neither partition exceeds 2 TB, I am not seeing any data corruption errors.
One thing I have read is that WDTV devices do not support 4K (4096 byte) sector size, and Windows 7 sometimes defaults to this sector size when formatting partitions. So make sure your sector size on the 2 partitions is not 4K or higher.
Great workaround. To bad I already have my over 2 TB of information on it and theres no backing up that much data anymore. Have to wait until they fix it. I hope its soon.
If I got it right, the problem is not the size of the HDD per se but if it uses or not the 4k block size format (internal HDD format technology). Like the Western Hard disk Drives using AF (advance Format) is a no go. I would think that all the 2.5T and Up would be using the 4K byte block size. But if I got it right you could have a 2T that still uses the 512 byte block and it will be 100% problem free and you could buy another 2T HDD but that one uses the 4K byte block and end up having problems later. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
It’s not that easy. Larger block sizes are used to keep the number of blocks that have to be addressed low. If you use smaller block sizes, the number of blocks will exceed the address range, and if you fill the HD, the address pointer will overflow. In that case, the HD will show a lower capacity than expected, or, even worse, it will overwrite data at the beginning of the address range.
Yesterday i update to 1.04.17 for second time to see if my new 2tb extrnal hard drive work.The install goes ok and the wd recognize the new 2tb hard disk without problem.I have 890gb used in this drive and work fine.
Not pleased with my useless 3TB right now that has all my media on it.
I have it hooked up to my computer and I’ll just grab something that I wanna watch and drag it to a small harddrive thats hooked up to the wdtv live through the network.
I know these forums can become quite negative, so we really appreciate when you (WD) provide ANY sort of update or simply acknowledge that you “hear us”
Wow, by chance I checked out the community forums and I’m glad I saw this. I’m currently rocking a 2tb and 1tb drive plugged into my WD HDTV Live box and was about to invest in a 3tb single drive… I guess there’s no point at this time if the box can’t support it, which is massively unfortunate.
I’m a massive fan of WD and their MyBook drives, along with the WD HDTV box. I’ve recommended it to so many people. If WD is releasing 3tb drives, you guys ultimately have to make sure the media box works with them because we all want to make use of it with our HD media.
You can actually use it if you have a home network - plug the drive into your PC and share the root of the drive. It will appear as a share under your PC under network locations. It’s not ideal, but at least will let you use the disk space in the interim (until WD fixes the issue).
You can actually use it if you have a home network - plug the drive into your PC and share the root of the drive.
Only if your PC supports GPT and supports drives larger than 2TB.
Win2k, WinXP and Vista all “support” GPT, but the 32-bit versions don’t support drives greater than 2TB, even when GPT and not MBR.
Even with 32-bit Vista, if your main boot drive is MBR, then it will behave just like Win2k and WinXP and not allow drives larger than 2TB, even if the other drives are GPT-formatted… trying to use larger drives can cause all sorts of problems, from the drive not being recognized at all, to data loss (similar to WD saying to not connect GPT drives greater than 2TB to the WDTV line).
64-Bit XP should be ok with a 3TB drive connected by USB.
64-Bit Vista should be ok with a 3TB drive.
32-Bit Vista will need the boot drive to also be GPT and not MBR.
All versions of Win7 should properly handle GPT drives.
