In the course of some experimentation with my “testbed” WDTVLIVEHUB (see my recent post “Good News: Replaced internal drive in WDTVLIVEHUB”), I discovered a new behavior I was not aware of. I had seen some contradictory advice about whether a 5tb external USB drive would work on WDTVLIVEHUB. Some posts here said YES; others seemed to have trouble with larger capacity drives??? So when I connected a new SEAGATE 5tb drive I was apprehensive. Well it worked - at first. But having seen it work with just a dozen movies, I took the drive back to my PC to load 100’s more movies. (I could have transferred them directly thru Ethernet from the PC, but OH that would have been slow given WDTVLIVEHUB’s slow Ethernet and slow USB.). WDTVLIVEHUB would no longer recognize the newly loaded drive!?!? I tried all kinds of workarounds. On my PC the drive looked fine; I even played movies. On WDTVLIVEHUB - nothing.
FINALLY - on my PC, I error-checked the drive. (In File Explorer, right-click the drive, select Properties, select Tools, select Error Checking). There were a couple of minor errors; Windows fixed them in 30 seconds. The drive now works 100% on WDTVLIVEHUB. I believe the errors snuck onto this [new] drive when I was too hurried in moving the drive back and forth from PC to WDTVLIVEHUB.
CONCLUSION: WDTVLIVEHUB must being doing a quick integrity check on the drive before connecting it. The errors must have been minor; Windows was able to read, recognize, and play movies off the drive. One common minor problem is when a disk sector is not currently in use, but that unused sector is also not listed on the free space list. That one sector is LOST; statistically almost insignificant, but strictly speaking, an error. WDTVLIVEHUB is being very picky - that’s fine - now that we know.
