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.