I currently have the Mediason ProBox 4-bay enclosure ( http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=36066&vpn=HF2-SU2S2&manufacture=Mediasonic&promoid=1324). The enclosure itself works great with my laptop and it recognizes all four drives. It also works flawlessly with my Mediasonic Media Player, again recognizing all four drives. However, I love the interface of my WD Live Plus player much better than the Mediasonic. Sadly, the WD Media Plus will only recognize one of the four drives at a time (the top drive in the enclosure). This is a pain, since I have to hot swap out drives if I want to watch something on a different drive.
It doesn’t sound like you have those 4 drives in a RAID, but rather separate drives. On your laptop, do they all show as 4 separate drive letters? If so, I am not sure (and it appears to not) support seeing all 4 separately. Does this device have the ability to be configured with JBOD (just a bunch of disks) or RAID 1 (striped)? Alternatively, if you are willing to lose some of the disk space and add redundancy, you can see if it does RAID 5 (striping with parity) or RAID 0 (mirror). Any of the RAID options would present the disk as one drive and the WD should see all the space. I have a DLink DNS323 2 bay enclosure with RAID 0 and the WD sees it just fine.
Sorry, perhaps I wasn’t clear. I currently have a non-RAID ProxProx. SO yes, it would show up as separate drives on my laptop. I am considering buying the RAID enclosure ( http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=51235&vpn=HFR2-SU2S2&manufacture=Mediasonic&promoid=1324) in the hopes that if I use one of the RAID settings, then it’ll show up as one big 8TB drive. To that, I have a couple of questions (since I am not technical):
Would this work? I have heard that the WD Live Plus only recognizes drives up to 2TB, so it probably wouldn’t recognize an 8TB RAIDed drive anyway?
If you do think it would work, what are the steps to making it happen? Again, I am not very technical so if somebody could give me a step by step, I would appreciate it.
Would this work? I have heard that the WD Live Plus only recognizes drives up to 2TB, so it probably wouldn’t recognize an 8TB RAIDed drive anyway?
The newest firmware does work with drives larger than 2TB, so if you were connecting it USB directly to the WDTV you’d be able to use it under the latest firmware. If you accessed it over a network, it makes no difference, as long as the computer it’s attached to can read it.
If you do think it would work, what are the steps to making it happen? Again, I am not very technical so if somebody could give me a step by step, I would appreciate it.
The stock WD firmwares will only recognize one drive per USB port… if the enclosure reports it as one big drive, then it will work, if the enclosure reports several drives, then you’ll have the same issue of only one drive showing up.
The newest firmware does work with drives larger than 2TB, so if you were connecting it USB directly to the WDTV you’d be able to use it under the latest firmware. If you accessed it over a network, it makes no difference, as long as the computer it’s attached to can read it.
The stock WD firmwares will only recognize one drive per USB port… if the enclosure reports it as one big drive, then it will work, if the enclosure reports several drives, then you’ll have the same issue of only one drive showing up.
Sorry, just so I’m clear. You’re saying," if the enclosure reports it as one big drive, then it will work, if the enclosure reports several drives, then you’ll have the same issue of only one drive showing up.". Is there any way I can know that until I actually buy the RAID enclosure and test it out? The impression I got from above is that if I install the latest firmware and set it to RAID0 Span, then it should be recognized as one drive and hence, it should work? Is that correct? Sorry if these are dumb questions. I just want to ensure that it should work before I actually shell out the dough to buy it.
Yes, sorry… that was just a general comment for others reading through this looking for enclosures…
If any enclosure reports the drives as separate drives, then only one will be accessible.
If that specific enclosure you’re asking about is set to Raid0 Span (like the manufacturer says it can be), then it will report itself as one giant drive, and the WDTV should have no problems under the new Firmware.
Sorry that I can’t “guarantee” that it will work, since I don’t own one to test with. It should work, since 3TB drives are now successfully being recognized and used, under the new firmware. If you have any reservations, I’d purchase from someplace that would let you return it if there is some issue when you try connecting it. I don’t foresee an issue, but I don’t know for sure.
Great, that is good to know. I think for the price, it worth the investment as I love the WD interface, as I said. So I will try to install the firmware and give it a shot.
I was editing/adding to my previous post… just adding a bit of CYA on my own part. I don’t see any issues with it working, but a good return policy is always a good insurance policy.
I *had* been using LaCie 500 and 1 TB drives. While they appear to be a single drive to the USB port, there is an internal Raid board merging two drives into one. In the case of the 1TB drive, there were 2 500GB IDE drives.
I had never had any trouble with these drives in any other situation, but when used on the WDTV Live+, I started getting data corruption. Files would no longer play. If I connected the drive back to my PC, it would flag errors and want to run CHKDSK. If I ran CHKDSK, it would find and repair errors.
I finally moved all my movies to single-disk drives of the same size and haven’t had a single issue since. The LaCie drives were re-purposed and have perfomred flawlessly, so there wasn’t any problem with the drives themselves.
So while a Raid drive may appear as a single device to the WDTV, I’d take that with a grain of salt. I no longer use any form of Raid directly connected to my WDTV Live+.
Oh, one thing though…do make sure to initially use blank, formatted hard drives when you set up your RAID initially. I merely threw in four full drives and ended up losing the data on all of them. Once I formatted them, I was good to go. Luckily, I had the four drives backed up elsewhere so it wasn’t too bad. Good lesson to learn though.
I had never had any trouble with these drives in any other situation, but when used on the WDTV Live+, I started getting data corruption. Files would no longer play. If I connected the drive back to my PC, it would flag errors and want to run CHKDSK. If I ran CHKDSK, it would find and repair errors.
I don’t think that’s a RAID-only issue… users report that occasionally happening on the Live, Live Plus and Live Hub, even when the attached drive is a single disc… I believe always "Eject"ing the drive helps prevent this.
It may or may not be, don’t know for sure. I can say that I haven’t had a lick of problem after switching to non-raid drives. After that, I’m just gun shy about using RAID drives on the WDTV.
