Hi, I bought this 3Tb MyBook external drive. I want to use it to store video and audio and connect the drive to my USB media player - a Philips DVD player with a USB port (it was super cheap and entry level but plays most things - DIVx and AVI’s).
It only reads FAT32
So I used EaseUSPartitionMaster Home Edition to remove the original NTFS partition, and formatted the entire drive as a FAT32 partition (cluster size 256Kb).
Formatting goes through quickly and without a hitch.
Then I spend 3 days copying 1Tb of data over to the drive - it seems to hang after every 2 minutes of fast transfer to the drive - I think maybe there is some sort of internal buffer that has to flush before new data can be transferred, and I am using a slightly older Motherboard with only USB2.0 and this thing has USB3.0 so I am unsure if that plays a part.
I plug in the drive to the media player, it loads fine, shows me the files, I try to play one and it plays the first 2 seconds and then loops those two seconds.
So, question 1 - why the delay copying data onto the drive?
Question 2 - Did I cause the problem by selecting the wrong cluster size, too large a FAT32 partition? Here is where I would love to know from WD what they recommend for the architecture of this drive as far as partitioning and file format options.
Thanks
Hi, it could be that some of the files that you transferred are corrupted, you can also try setting the the cluster size to 512Kb, but next time try to transfer just a couple of movies to see if the problem continues.
Hi Alucardx23
Um, no, my files are fine - they are stored on an External 1Tb drive currently and play fine from that drive.
I copied them again, just to be sure - no problem with the files.
OK, so I got impatient - I formatted and repartitioned my 3Tb - 3 X 1Tb FAt32 partitions. The copy process is better - it seems as if this drive does not like one big FAt32 partition across the whole drive.
My Philips media player does not see the drive at all now. But that is OK - I went out and bought this great little media player - the Egreat R6A-II - man, this thing plays anything, and sees the 3Tb drive - in fact it sees anything, plays anything, traverses my network to my PC and pulls media from there as well.
So I now have to just figure out what is the best partitioning and file system combination for the 3Tb drive.
If I have any great results I will post them here.
Thanks, live long and prosper.
Formatted my entire drive as one 2.7Tb NTFS partition - copying 1Tb worth of data and it is going fine - no delays.
I tested the read function before the large copy - works fine.
So these drives do not like one large FAT32 partition of the maximum size.
NTFS is fine, just avoid using FAT32.
Hope this helps someone else.
Also, just a note about media players - if it is pre-2012, then it probably will not see a 3Tb drive, but as above my Egreat player is tops and sees anything I throw at it.
