Do Enclosures work with the WD TV Live Hub Media Player?

I guess then if I want all 8 drives (on my 8 bay JBOD Enclosure) to show up individually on my WD TV Live Hub then my only option is to have the 8 bay enclsoure connected to my PC and have it stream to my WD TV Live Hub Downstairs?

Yes, and no.  As I say, it depends on the enclosure.  Some are capable of presenting the drives as a single volume… but the catch is you have to format them that way to begin with.  If your enclosure did support that, but isn’t set up that way, you’d have to wipe everything on all the drives and start all over again.  So, without starting from scratch, as far as I know you would have to access it over a network, yes.

Anyone have success with doing just that?

Not me personally, but yes, folks have had success with enclosures… both ways, in fact.  People have come back to say that their appearing-as-a-single-volume-enclosure has worked just fine.  People have also used enclosures over the network, where multiple drives are presented, without a hitch, and come here to ask if there’s any way to get all the drives recognized if connected directly to the WDTV instead of over the network (and, so far the answer has been “no”).  So, we do appear to have evidence that both ways work.

any issues that I may run into?

As long as your network is working right, and your files are shared properly, there shouldn’t be any issues.  Some folks get network shares to work just fine right off the bat, and others seem to have no end to their headaches of trying to get them to work.

The main “issue” with connecting over the network is the bitrate of the files.  If you access the files from an attached USB drive, or over a DLNA server, the WDTVs will pretty much play anything.  But there seems to be an issue with Samba talking to PCs (Samba = Network Shares).  Once the bitrate of the file starts getting above 20Mbit/sec, Samba may not be able to keep up and your files may stutter.  If all your files are below that, you should be fine.  If you have high-bitrate files (such as BluRay rips that haven’t be re-compressed/re-encoded), you may find that you either need to spend the time re-encoding them, or you’d have to access them over a Media Server instead of with Network Shares.

Does the WD TV Live Hub officially support that? Any other alternatives?

The WDTVs don’t/can’t know how the PC is reading the files.  Even sticking with Windows PCs specifically, and leaving the WDTVs out of it for the minute, if you have a Win7 PC that fully supports large drives, another PC on the network, running earlier versions of Windows, has no problems accessing the files, even if that Windows doesn’t support large drives.  All that matters is that the network works and that the PC the drive/enclosure is attached to can read the drive/enclosure.  So, since the WDTVs officially support Windows Sharing through Samba, the WDTVs would officially support any device connected to a shared network computer, as long as the computer supports the device attached to it.

That I know of, there aren’t any alternatives.  As I say, if your drives weren’t already filled and if the enclosure supported it, you could “turn it into” one huge drive, and then it should work fine attached directly to the WDTV over USB.  But, if the enclosure doesn’t support spanning into one volume and/or you don’t want to re-format/re-install 24TB worth of media, then the only way I know of is to attach the enclosure drectly to a PC (or possibly a router) and then access it over the LAN.  As I say, if all your files are under about 15 or 20 Mbit/sec, you should have no problems.  I have no problems with 1080p .mkv rips over my 10/100 network.  If you have high-bitrate files and don’t want to re-encode everything, you’d have to find a Media Server that will serve that file type, and access them from Media Server instead of Network Shares.

Wow! Great info, Thank you!

I’m a bit confused by the first statement you made in the First post:

“Yes, and no.  As I say, it depends on the enclosure.  Some are capable of presenting the drives as a single volume… but the catch is you have to format them that way to begin with.  If your enclosure did support that, but isn’t set up that way, you’d have to wipe everything on all the drives and start all over again.  So, without starting from scratch, as far as I know you would have to access it over a network, yes.”

So what you’re saying is that if I have the enclosure connected to my PC and I have it streaming to my Media Player over my network, it may show up as multiple drives or as only a single volume, depending on the enclosure? My Enclosure can’t be formatted into a single volume, only individual drives.

The reason I went with this enclosure is that if a drive fails I won’t lose the data on the whole volume. I could have gone with a Raid 6 setup but I would lose too much free space.

Hi.

What is the Model # of your Sans Digital enclosure?

So what you’re saying is that if I have the enclosure connected to my PC and I have it streaming to my Media Player over my network, it may show up as multiple drives or as only a single volume, depending on the enclosure? My Enclosure can’t be formatted into a single volume, only individual drives.

There are 2 conflicting meanings of “JBOD”:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-RAID_drive_architectures

JBOD, meaning “Just a Bunch Of Drives” is used to refer to two distinct concepts:

  • all disks being independently addressed, with no collective properties – each physical disk, with all the logical partitions each may contain, being mapped to a different logical volume: just a bunch of disks.
  • concatenation, where all the physical disks are concatenated and presented as a single disk.

Since I didn’t know which usage of “JBOD” your manufacturer was using, I didn’t know if your specific enclosure would span all the drives into a single volume, or not.  Some will.  But, as I said, you can’t just stick pre-filled drives into them (if you had one)… you have to format it as one huge honkin’ volume after installing the drives, losing everything that may have been on them.

So, if your enclosure will not “Span” them into one volume (which you are saying it won’t), then you can only connect it to the PC and share all 8 over the LAN.  On the other hand, a span-ning enclosure would work connected directly to the WDTV (as reported by others – haven’t done it myself).

The JBOD in reference here is the one that assimilates all the drives into one volume. In that way, it is quite similar to a RAID (0) array, but the difference is that you can have a complete random mixture of drives. For example, you can have one of each of these: 1TB, 3TB, 250GB, 500GB or any other combination. For a RAID 0 array to get them all to show up as one volume (as well as all the performance benefits), the smallest drive (250GB in our case) is the most that any of the other drives can contribute to the RAID volume. So since 250 is our smallest, when using RAID 0, every other drive will only be able to use 250GB and that will be incorporated into the RAID array, giving you a total of 1TB (250GBx4 drives).

With JBOD, it is similar to a RAID array in that it combines multiple hard drives together into one volume, but size doesn’t matter and you don’t get any of the performance enhancements. You can create a single volume out of 2x1TB drives, a 320GB drive, and a 120GB drive or any other combination, giving you a total of the sum of all your drives (in this case 2440GB i think).

But yeah, that’s the JBOD we’re talking about.

Thanks guys. the model of my enclosure is the Sans digital TowerRaid TR8U+B JBOD Enclosure. Here’s the link to it:  http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid-/tr8uplusb.html. There are two types of JBOD Enclosures, there’s JBOD enclosures that do spanning where it combines all drives into one massive one and there’s JBOD Enclosures that have each drive indivually.

The downside to having all drives as a single volume is that if a drive fails you lost the whole array. My Enclosure does not support Raid or Spanning. My Enclosure has all 8 drives indivually, there’s no other option with my enclosure. If a hard drive in my enclosure fails I will only lose data on that specific drive.

I appreciate the help