Local storage problem

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
1

Hello. Long time lurker, first time poster here.

I’ve been looking for a fix to this particular issue for a few days now without much luck, so I thought I may as well post it directly.

I’m using a WDTV Live Hub with two external hard drives plugged into the Hub via USB. There is a 1tb Seagate external hdd plugged into the front, and a 2tb Seagate external hdd plugged into the back port.

The 1tb drive in the front works fine, no issues. The problem is the 2tb hard drive, which the hub recognizes as being plugged in, but shows the familiar “No media in the current drive” message whenever I try to actually access it.

When I navigate to local storage, I can select both hard drives, but only the 1tb hard drive actually shows files.

I’ve noticed that for some reason, the light on the 2tb drive is off when connected to the Hub, which I’m guessing is why the Hub cannot read the files. This is odd, though, because the Hub still recognises the name of the drive, and that it’s plugged in. When I go into the Setup menu to check if the device can be recognised, sure enough, I can see it there, but it’s showing no data on the drive. There is at least 1.2 TB worth of data on the drive.

The light only remains off when plugged into the Hub. I’ve had it plugged into my PC now for 15 minutes with no issues, currently defragging the drive to see if that helps, though I’m not holding my breath. I’ve tried unplugging the power and plugging it back in, which turns the light on for about a minute or so, and then switches off. The Hub light flashes while this goes on, so it looks like the Hub is trying to update the media library, and once this is done, the hdd powers off.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

TL; DR: 2tb hard drive turns itself off when it’s plugged into the hub so data can’t be read.

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Many recent model Seagate drives have a sleep mode.  Perhaps your drives are going to sleep, which may or may not be a problem.

I bought two Seagate 1TB GoFlex drives within the past year, but not at the same time.  Like many other folks, I just hooked up the drives (not to my WD, but to PC) and the first drive went into sleep mode in 5 minutes.  I thought, cool, (because I have other drives that do this, too.)

A few months later bought another of these drives, and it never went into sleep mode!  So, I had to dig via Google to find the reason why.  It turns out that one of the programs on the drive I did not bother to install is called Seagate Dashboard, and one of the features of the program is a way to adjust the drive’s sleep times.  So, I installed it (downloaded current version from Seagate).  I learned the default sleep time is 5 minutes.  OK, first drive must be preset for that, but the second drive was set for Never!  Duh, right out of the box and it was not set for the default sleep time. Tisk, tisk, Seagate.

So, the problem was solved, and if you have not installed Seagate Dashboard on your computer, now is a good time for it and check the sleep time settings of both your drives so they are where you want them set.

All this said, and your problem likely may not be related to sleep mode.  Two Hitachi drives connected to my WD are preset to go to sleep in 5 mins. and no adjustments.  Anyway, they are often asleep more than they are awake, but when the WD calls on either of them for data, I hear them spin up.  So, no problems from them with the WD.

You said you had the drives on your PC and were defragging.  That probably was not necessary, but when they were on there did you scan them for errors?  Good thing to do a couple of times a year.

Another idea:   Have you swapped the drives to be in the other’s USB port on the WD?  This way, if the problem changes sides, it is the drive being the problem.  If it doesn’t, then it is the port being the problem.

Good luck.

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Is the drive properly formatted as NTFS?