Every time I plug my harddrive in to the unit it scans for like 5 minutes and I honestly don’t know what the point of it is. I’m guessing that the software wants to create some sort of index, but since I only ever use the “Files” feature and disabled any “media library” features as far as I can I can’t see what any sort of indexing would possibly achieve other than make the harddrive unusable for 5 minutes every time.
Is there any way to disable it to the point that harddrives don’t get scanned? If not, this would be a great anti-feature for users that are happy with a good old fashion file system.
Yes, I definitely have it switched off which is why I’m so surprised by the (apparent) scanning. On screen you can browse the menus as usual and there’s no indication that there is a harddrive plugged in yet, while the white LED on the unit keeps flashing. If you try to do anything with the harddrive (like access it to play media) before the flashing stops then it basically doesn’t recognize that there’s a harddrive plugged in yet.
I should also mention that on my old WD TVs (I had both 1st Gen black and 2nd Gen gray versions) there was no apparent scanning (also had media library switched off) and the harddrive detection LED stopped flashing after about 10 seconds and everything was ready to go.
Great suggestion… Windows just offered to “scan and fix” my drive so I’ll report back when I plug it back into the unit tonight…
At home I use MacOS that doesn’t seem to notice any former dismount problems the way Windows does, so my drive could have been like this for a while.
Edit: MacOS doesn’t have native support for NTFS, which this drive is formatted in. I use a 3rd party tool. I’ll also do a test if this tool messes up my drive as far as Windows is concerned.
So just a follow on, if this does appear to be the issue, you need to remember to EJECT the drive from the WD before you unplug it or do a full power down.
I always eject on the WD, what I sometimes don’t do is eject on Windows because it just won’t let go of the drive. But now I know this isn’t the issue. I let Windows fix the drive and it still scans for about 5 minutes.
So I did a little experiment. There is one directory on the drive with lots of subdirectories/files that account for most of the files on the disk. I zipped it up (on the disk) and deleted the originals. This brought the initial scan on my WD down from 5 minutes to about a minute. So it really still looks like it is trying to scan all files on the harddrive.
I’m going to continue with a few more experiments and post my updates here. Perhaps deleting all the WD TV database files from the disk and then trying again (maybe there is some remnants of a media library in the database from before I switched the feature off).
