Quick question: Does the WD TV Live Hub *need* it’s internal hardrive? If not, is it easy to take out? Because I’d rather sell the hardrive and purchase a 3.5" 2TB drive for the same price. Thanks and please don’t flame me for this; I can’t stand the transfer rate of this thing.
Well, it depends on what you plan on doing with it.
The media library is ONLY stored on the internal HD. But aside from that, I don’t think it’s necessary.
Easy to take out? Yeah, for the reasonably dexterous folk… 
Are you knowledgable in how to get the drive out? I haven’t inspected the unit surrounding the drive.
Remove the internal WDTV HD is easy. The connection is equal to that of a notebook.
Simply remove the top cover and the right side of WDTV going to see the HD.
WDTV know if the work without the HD or if you add a HD to the appropriate format.
Here I leave a picture of WDTV not the case.
http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/1456/WDTV_Hub_PCB_1.jpg
Yes, it can be removed and replaced rather easily. The OS firmware is embedded in a chip, not the hard drive. But I doubt you’ll see any real transfer speed increase from a different drive. Much of the bottleneck has to do with the OS and not drive speed.
Just a quick warning. There is not a lot of room in the unit and you can only use a Western Digital drive.
Isn’t this restriction to the brand of hard drive NOT it’s physical size as (I think) all 2.5 SATA drives are the same, or nearly the same, dimensions?
richUK wrote:
Just a quick warning. There is not a lot of room in the unit and you can only use a Western Digital drive.
flhthemi wrote:
Isn’t this restriction to the brand of hard drive NOT it’s physical size as (I think) all 2.5 SATA drives are the same, or nearly the same, dimensions?
richUK wrote:
Just a quick warning. There is not a lot of room in the unit and you can only use a Western Digital drive.
If you read the top post you will see that the original poster mentioned a 3.5" 2TB drive. As he was asking if he can operate without an internal hard drive I was unsure as to how he was going to proceed. However for anybody else reading it was better to mention that it needed a WD drive and not to forget the limited room available in the box just in case they assumed that a 3.5" would fit.
I was just asking, mainly about it’s HAVING to be a WD drive if you decide to replace the internal one due to a failure or upgrade…sorry for the confusion.
So, does the internal drive have to be a WD drive? 
Yes.
TonyPh12345 wrote:
Yes.
Tony, I’m sorry, but I’m not understanding. Are you saying it has to be a WD drive because of space limitations inside the Hub? That would mean it has to be a WD drive made specifically for the Hub as 3.5" notebook hard drives are all standard in size. If it is just a standard 3.5" drive then the requirement it be a WD drive must be something encoded in the Hub to only recognize WD drives and has nothing to do with physical size. Please clarify.
No.
The firmware checks the PROM on the drive for its manufacturer code. If it’s not WD, it won’t allow it to be used.
But anyway, all NOTEBOOK drives are 2.5", not 3.5". It’s just a standard Scorpio Blue drive in there.
OK, that’s what I figured…it has nothing to do with the drive size (any notebook drive will fit), but with code embedded in the Hub that will only recognize a WD drive.
Sorry for the confusion. I am taking out this hardrive to sell it and buy a 2TB hardrive (for my desktop computer). I have no desire for the internal hardrive and it’s slow transfer speeds; I’d very much rather stream video across a network instead and manage all my files from my computer. I do intend on installing a 2.5" hardrive back into this hub, to avoid the nagging screen, however. Does anyone know if a smaller 120gb approx. hd would work with this, if it’s WD?
Why not just sell the Hub as is and get a WDTV Plus. All the same features without the hard drive.
Conquistador wrote:
Sorry for the confusion. I am taking out this hardrive to sell it and buy a 2TB hardrive (for my desktop computer). I have no desire for the internal hardrive and it’s slow transfer speeds; I’d very much rather stream video across a network instead and manage all my files from my computer. I do intend on installing a 2.5" hardrive back into this hub, to avoid the nagging screen, however. Does anyone know if a smaller 120gb approx. hd would work with this, if it’s WD?
So you are actually ready to void the warranty, remove the default WD Scorpio blue 1 tb hd and sell it for perhaps 80-90 $, then replace it with a cheaper scorpio blue <500 gb for approx. 40-50 $ - So all in all you might save 30-50 $??
Miami_Son wrote:
Why not just sell the Hub as is and get a WDTV Plus. All the same features without the hard drive.
That is not right, there are both hardware & software differences between the WDTV live plus and the WDTV live hub!
Conquistador wrote:
Sorry for the confusion. I am taking out this hardrive to sell it and buy a 2TB hardrive (for my desktop computer). I have no desire for the internal hardrive and it’s slow transfer speeds; I’d very much rather stream video across a network instead and manage all my files from my computer. I do intend on installing a 2.5" hardrive back into this hub, to avoid the nagging screen, however. Does anyone know if a smaller 120gb approx. hd would work with this, if it’s WD?
Its likely that a smaller drive will work as long as it is a WD type and the correct size to fit the unit.
Frillen wrote:
Conquistador wrote:
Sorry for the confusion. I am taking out this hardrive to sell it and buy a 2TB hardrive (for my desktop computer). I have no desire for the internal hardrive and it’s slow transfer speeds; I’d very much rather stream video across a network instead and manage all my files from my computer. I do intend on installing a 2.5" hardrive back into this hub, to avoid the nagging screen, however. Does anyone know if a smaller 120gb approx. hd would work with this, if it’s WD?
So you are actually ready to void the warranty, remove the default WD Scorpio blue 1 tb hd and sell it for perhaps 80-90 $, then replace it with a cheaper scorpio blue <500 gb for approx. 40-50 $ - So all in all you might save 30-50 $??
Miami_Son wrote:
Why not just sell the Hub as is and get a WDTV Plus. All the same features without the hard drive.
That is not right, there are both hardware & software differences between the WDTV live plus and the WDTV live hub!
- *> There was no warranty to void. The item was bought off Craigslist because some ■■■■■ tried to scam me. He sold it to me for 100 dollars knowing “something” was wrong with it. It turns out that it was just the power button, which I opened up and disconnected. I have already sold the internal laptop hardrive for 80 dollars. I then purchased a 3.5" 2TB WD Green drive for 60 dollars and doubled my storage capacity! So, in all, it’s much as if I got the unit for 20 dollars. The internal drive does not concern me, so I will be waiting on a cheap scorpio blue to add to the hub. That sounds like a win to me, don’t you think?
Are you running the Hub without an Internal hard disk?
I opened my Hub to fix the bad switch as well (I bought the Hub in another country, so I couldn’t RMA it) While I had the Hub open I removed the internal disk to see if it would boot. The Hub warned that the disk was missing and then seemed to hang. I had an old WD Passport 250Gb disk laying around, so I put that in the Hub. The Hub booted, gave a warning that the disk would be formatted and then booted up. I had to recompile the Media Library. I can now use the Hubs’ 1 Tb disk as an external drive. I have my media stored on a NAS so I only need a disk in the Hub to store the Media Library and some temporary files. The 250Gb disk should be more that enough for that.
Actually I found when I swapped the Hub internal drive with the Passport 2.5" drive, the Hubs Internal Scorpio Blue drive is slightly thicker that the Passport Scorpio. The 250 Gb Passport drive needed a bit of extra packing when I put it into the Hub. The 1 Tb Hub drive is too thick to fit into the Passport case, so I will have to find another case for it. The actual length and width of the drives is almost the same, it’s just the thickness that is different.
