I wanted to post this because I’ve read so many posts and done a lot of research to find out if you can take a WD desktop hard drive over 2TB or any LARGE TB desktop hard drive and use it inside.
Everything I’ve read says NO, you can’t do anything more than 2TB with the box…
Ok I want to set the record straight as I just took a WD GREEN 5TB and use it as the primary hard drive inside the box and it works PERFECTLY giving me 4.5TB.
How did I do this?? Pretty easy actually, I made the MRB as a GPT hard drive, then formatted it, then I created a partition called WDTVPriv and copied all the system files on to that partition, then formatted the rest of the drive and called it WD and WALA it works exactly like the 1TB Blue inside the box.
So if your looking to upgrade your hard drive inside the WD Live TV Hub more than 2 TB, it’s very possible and easy to do!!
Let me give everyone all the details of my plan and what i’m doing.
My goal was to be able to use a desktop hard drive as the main drive in the box that is atleast between 5 - 8TB. Obviously the 3.5 drive is not going to fit in the device and that is 100% fine for me. I need my hard drive to be accessable at all times that I can take out and mess around with without having to take apart the box all the time.
So my plan is to purchase one of these trayless dock for a 3.5 hdds (see link below). I’ll run my own power adapter to the back of the dock and then run my sata cable to the box (I bought an elbow SATA adapter to plug into the inside of the box to connect the sata cable to) and connect it to the back of the dock. The dock below will work perfect to plug and play.
This will then allow me to have 1 main hard drive that is easily accessable in my box.
I don’t have pictures yet, I didn’t want to buy all the parts and everything if it didn’t work. I should have my dock tomorrow and once I have it all it all put together I’ll take a pic and post it. :)
Let’s just say I have my own reasons to why I want to use a desktop hard drive only and not use a USB. There are a lot of up sides to this for me, it makes everything I do with updating my box and play around with it that much easier than having to do it through my network.
Plus I did want to see if the firmware would let me use such a large hard drive as the primary and see if this was all possible at all because everything I read said it couldn’t be done.
Right now as my box sits, I have a total of 6 TB, I have a a 2TB WD Green 2.5" hard drive inside, then I have a 4TB USB Seagate hard drive plugged in as my 2ndary hard drive.
I just sent back the 5TB and ordered a 6TB WD Green 3.5" and will receive this week and will start to build everything.
Interesting since the video I watched said it could hand two small 2TB hard drives at once… That’s ok. I may just need to do some modifications to the case in the back or something, I’m not worried.
Trust me, I will get it working and setup the way I am trying to and send pic’s once it’s done.
Just wanted to give an update on my progress, I’m still building everything and making it look nice and pretty in the case, but as you can see below the 6TB works perfectly as the primary hdd inside.
I actually have all the data backed up on a 2TB + 4TB. So yes, plus I have several other 1 & 2TBs laying around. I have actually thought about buying My Cloud EX2 as a backup device for everything I have with it’s own HDD’s outside of the box and what i’m doing.
Btw - You were right, that dock, it didn’t work and instead of taking it apart which I was going to do and modify the back, I talked to the mfg for Startech and they said this would work perfectly with a Sata to Esata cable and is a straight pass through with no size limits on the hard drive size.
So since i’m not sending back the other dock I decided to modify it since I have the parts.
Here’s the finished product, I removed their circuit board and added a straight pass through connector on the back of the dock so that I can connect any TB size hard drive inside…
