I have a D-Link ShareCenter Quattro DNS 345 NAS. It provides 2 RAID Type 1 Volumes as Windows shares and no servers are set up. The shares are mapped on my pc with their own drive letter. They store my music and movie files. To miminise drive wear, the NAS is set to turn on and off at specific times each day (when I’m likely to be at home).
They are accessed for movies by two WD TV Live units each attached to a separate TV. The main WD TV Live is the latest version (1 USB port on the front and 1 on the back, fully-featured remote) and the second unit is the older version (1 USB port on the side and 1 on the back, basic remote). They are set with different device names and assigned correctly to my home network Workgroup. Both are connected to my home network via NetGear Powerline units delivering around 200 Mps. My method of access on both WD TV Live units is to “Network Shares”.
It can take up to a few minutes for the units to find network shares after power on and sometimes the wait is so long it seems as though they will never find the shares. The difficulty is that the behaviour is unpredictable. Sometimes the units find the shares within a few seconds, sometimes they take 10 minutes or so. Sometimes, it’s the new unit which “misbehaves”, sometimes the old. I’ve even powered up both unts more or less simultaneously and found one unit finding the shares right away and the other, apparently, never finding them. It seems from other posts that the whole business of seeing shares is pretty unreliable. Is there anything that can be done to improve things?
When you try to access the NAS from your computer, do you have the same problem?
No. I can access the NAS shaes direct from my pc with no problem. Last evening, the old WD TV Live was finding the shares with a minute or so of power up. I could not get the newer WD TV Live to see the shares (or, at least, I waited 10 minutes or so with no result).
I experience the same or similar issues. I have both Win 7 and XP computers and I beleive the problem is related to the Win 7 sharing, as the problem is most frequent when the Win 7 is rebooted. I do not think the problem is with my Live Plus player, as it basically “reports” what the network tells it about shares.
This is how I "fixed’ the problem today when all shares were lost after computers came back on line from sleep mode or just from rebooting:
I disconnect the WIn 7 network cable to remove it from the network for a while when it is on. ( I do this because it seems to block other shares from showing up sometimes.) I then reboot the WD Live Plus. It often then sees the other network shares. I then reconnect the Win 7 network cable and often the shares are all there again. But this did not happen fully today, so the other thing I did was to go into the WD player Settings/Network Settings/Network Setup and click on auto to reconnect to the network (even though it is connected). Once this was successful, I went right to take a look at the Shares and they were all there again, and have remained that way all day.
I believe why all this works to fix things is that the network is not reporting all the shares and/or the Win 7 screws things up somehow. Who knows, but whatever the case it is a pain; especially since all PCs always see the shares, but sometimes the Live Plus doesn’t.
