WD TV Live not recognising portable hard drives

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

I have a first gen WD Live TV with latest firmware. All hard drives are in NTFS format. I have tried power cycling and factory reset to no avail.

When I connect my seagate 1 TB hard drive that has external power source it works perfectly.

When i connect a flash drive it works perfectly.

But when i connect my seagate portable 1TB hard drive it is not recognised and the same occurs with hitachi 50gb portable hard drive.

is there anything i can do to make my WD TV Live to recognise this hardware??

2

Your message should have been posted in the main SMP forum – this one is about issues with firmware.  Maybe a moderator will move it there.

Meanwhile, many portable drives need more power since they do not have a power supply.  This is accomplished by using a USB cable that is “double-headed”, and one USB connector part of cable is used just for power; other is both data and power.  So, are your drives powering up when you connect them to the WDTV, or do they sound like they are trying to spin up but never make it?  If that is the case, the WD doesn’t have enough power for the drive to work on it, take them off of WD.

3

Power indicators light up on the hard drives when connected but the USB symbol never flashes on the WDTV. I still think you may be correct that they are not recieving enough power. I am considering buying a mains powered usb hub and connect both my drives through that, do you think this would solve the issue? Are there any recommended USB hubs i should purchase?

4

I am not going to recomment a hub; mainly because just a week ago I put a new powered hub on the WD and could not get it to run with two POWERED drives on it.

A light does not indicate spinning, only that power is present.  When you put your portable drives on, LISTEN to each drive; does it spin up and run smoothly, or does it sort of go “chug-chug” like it can’t get spinning and can’t get up to speed?  (That’s the sound of a power issue).  Also, afterward, put both drives on a Win PC and let the OS scan the drives for errors.

I have had portable drives on WD, and they worked fine and did not need additional power, but some older ones do.  It is important to me that drives on my WD spin down and go idle if not used within 5-10 mins.  I leave the WD on 24/7 but do not want drives spinning needlessly the whole time.  Modern drives with their own power supplies mostly do this, and most of the newest portables do, too.  Even though the WD takes USB2 drives, all new drive models today are USB3, but not a problem, because they also work fine at USB2 – just not as fast, that way of course.  My WD has two 3.5" drives attached in their own enclosures w/power supply for each one.  They hide behind the large TV.