I have a 1st gen wdtv box and was running 1tb hd and worked fine, bought a 3tb hd and is not reading. Im wonder how i can get it to work ? Am I missing something or do I need to down size the HD ? Any help on this would greatly welcomed.
I believe you’re limited to 2TB drives.
I don’t think partitioning the drive smaller would work. I’m pretty sure it’s 2TB per USB connector, regardless of how the drive is partitioned.
There are certianly no 3TB drives on the list of supported drives, and with the Gen1 being EOL, you’re not going to get WD to change this, even if it was technically possible, which I don’t think it is.
I know the MBR is limited to 2TB, but I’m not exactly sure how this extends into the USB realm. In other words, if you get around the MBR limit, I’m not sure if/why there are other limitations. Who knows.
It appears as if the “trick” Seagate uses to get around the 2TB limit, will work with XP, Vista and Win7, but isn’t recognized by any of the WD devices (nor many other brands of Media Player). I guess we can conlude that when Seagate says it’s compatible with WinXP, Vista, Win7 and MacOS, that you actually need it connected to one of those systems to use it. Perhaps they need to be more clear about that.
Sounds logical. After spending all this money on the 3tb i hate to not use it but atleast i know now 2tb is the limit…
I asked WD about this and their only comment was that the Seagate brand could not be tested/verified by them. On asking them what would happen if WD made a 3TB drive I got a reply about different controllers or something - basically, it sounds like it’s a big issue to make these larger drives compatible. The sub-optimal solution I’m using at the moment is accessing the Seagate drive via Network sharing (I have the TV Live media player). That brings other problems of its own (right now, the files and folders are all showing correctly but nothing will play) but its the only option available at present.
john103 wrote:
After spending all this money on the 3tb i hate to not use it
Well, if you’re willing to look at third-party firmware, you might be back in business, depending on your setup.
Some of the third-party Gen1 firmwares (based on WD’s 1.03.01) will allow you to connect to network shares and allow you to use USB ethernet, so this might just be the ticket.
So, it’s possible (I believe) for you to get a USB ethernet adaptor and then leave the 3TB connected to your PC and access it over the network.
Any support for that would have to come from other sites, tho… WD doesn’t really appreciate support for third-party firmware here, understandably.
But, If you were going to go that route, I’d recommend confirming with the third-party community whether it will work, before you go out and buy an adaptor.
Sure, it’s not as neat as plugging the drive in directly, and might have a few setup difficulties getting everything working right, but it might get the drive streaming media to your Gen1, like you originally wanted.
The gen 1 WDTV can’t support volumes over 2TB due to a driver limitation. The later WDTV products do not have this limitation. However, we have not tested the Seagate 3TB drive, so I can’t guarantee compatibility with it.
Thanks Guy… I thought they all did… that’s good to know that the newer ones may not be limited.
I’m afraid not chaps. My 3TB GoFlex will be returned tomorrow. My WDTV is Gen 2 (not Live though).
I don’t think the current WDTV’s will be compatible at all, however a new version will come out soon I bet. I wish I had known, I just spent 3 days moving files around…!
Unlike Guy_K, I can guarantee that the Seagate STAC 3000200 is NOT compatible with the WD Live Player.
I can also confirm that WD aren’t really interested in the matter either!
We recently discovered an incompatibility issue with some newer devices that have 4k logical sectors. The 3TB Seagate drive might be such a device.
This partially affects the 3TB My Book Essential - if it’s formatted for use with Windows XP, it’ll have 4k logical sectors and won’t be recognized by WDTVs. If it’s formatted for Vista or Win 7 and has 512 byte logical sectors, it will work normally (but won’t be recognized by Win XP).
Is this something that can be worked out/fixed with a firmware upgrade, Guy?
I run XP so formatting under Windows 7 is not really a good option at the moment for me. If there is any hope at all of updating the device via firmware to rectify this, it’d be a huge help, and greatly appreciated.
Cheers.
I think this should be fixable (but I can’t say for sure). However, I don’t know when or if this might be fixed.
