I got a question regarding my mother’s failed WD TV Live Hub internal drive. Basically it has become dysfunctional to the point where it takes at least 3 minutes for it to load and fixing it on windows or formatting has been unsuccessful. So needless to say the drive is faulty.
Since it’s stupid in my opinion to pay $100 for another WD10TPVT from Ebay and even then I’m concerned that the drive will fail again just as the previous one had. So my natural alternative is using an external drive (with more space) and plug it in through the USB, but can I use any external drive other than WD? And does it need its own power source or will it run just fine through the USB port?
And one last thing, since I haven’t had time to test it out yet, but I can remove the internal drive completely and run the media player without it? Because leaving it in causes it to run extremely slow, or am I to assume its necessary for the firmware etc.?
If anyone has other suggestions, I’m all ears, thank you…
Yea, I tried both from the media player itself and from Windows. Also, when I tried to reload the movies from my computer to the wd drive, and this is when I physically attached it to my computer too rule out the network, the burst transfer rate would start of fine but after 10 seconds the transfer speed dipped down from 125MB/s to less than 8mb/s. Additionally, when I had the drive connected to my computer, whenever I tried booting it would even cripple my boot time. That’s kind of when I knew the five had to many bad sectors on it.
And you mentioned any 2.5" sata drive would work, but I was under the impression only the same drive would work? Was this fixed in a firmware update?
One other little thing to note is how thick the original drive is if you intend to replace it. Pretty sure you can use a 2TB as WD did for the Hub at a later point in time.
Yes, I have successfully replaced internal drive with a Seagate, 2.5" 1TB drive model # ST1000LM024 (5400 RPM) that I had taken out of a deceased laptop.
I am a WD digital fan and would have preferred to buy a “New” WD digital drive for the reliability… but i couldn’t argue with the price for this drive (FREE!).
A few years ago I’d read that you couldn’t replace the internal drive with anything other than a WD drive… but recently i read post from others that it had been “fixed” in firmware to allow any drive to work.
So naturally, I tried this Seagate. I’ve had no problems except that it gets warmer than the old WD drive in my other unit. I fixed THAT issue by placing it near a well ventilated spot to get cool air.
I did all that to get rid of the error message you get if you remove the hard drive from the unit… Oh, it works just fine with the error message about a missing hard drive but I just got tired of seeing it and rummaged around for a spare drive. When someone gave me a dead laptop for parts, and I immediately looked inside to get the 2.5" SATA drive out for use in my WDTV Hub.
Personally, if you have to go buy one, I’d get external HD’s… if your’s is failing. But don’t put your only copies of your video’s on your WDTV hubs’ drives… Hard drives will not last forever. (Always have backups!)
