A few things I have learned as a newbie regarding USB drives and my WDTV SMP

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
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Maybe this may save someone from a few hours of extra effort and wasted time.

With my USB drive attached to the SMP, I have learned not to restart (under the system settings menue) the SMP prior to ejecting the drive.  Doing so makes it unreadable until I hook it to my PC and do an error check/correction.  A power interruption while it is active also causes the issue.

My ASUS router has USB ports for attaching USB drives.  However, it’s firmware will not permit setting network access permissions specifically to subfolders for folders created at the root level.  The Media Manager needs access to write to the level above your selected folder.  With my settup this causes the SMP to try to write to the root of the drive which is not permitted and generates a message that the drive is read only.  Normal netshares work fine without media manager.

Any other lessons learned the hard way by any of you?

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What type of USB drive are you using? I’ve had a standard HDD installed inside a USB converter case hooked up to my WD Live since I bought it back in Nov 11’. I’ve never had the problem you describe. I’ve had to restart or hard boot my device a lot and the only thing that sometimes gets messed up is my “network drive” setup on my PC.  That’s easy to fix by running the WD Link app on my PC and finding my HDD again. But the WD Live never has a problem seeing the drive and reading from it.

It’s not a USB 3 drive connected to the back USB port is it? Because there’s a issue with that. Try the front port and see if you still have the problem.

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Same here, rebooting with drive attached to the back port is fine.