What storage do you use?

Ive filled a 1TB within maybe 6 months so I was looking to expand ASAP.

I pretty much just use it for storage of files for the WD TV live, would prefer to stick to Western Digital and am prepared to negotiate with the colour being black and minimal display lights (due to being beside the TV.

Does anyone have some suggestions or experience on what they use, ie 4TB/ 8TB etc, please?

Jay

Jay,

The biggest single drive you can use is 2TB, and I think WD makes one of those.  You can, of course, put one on each USB port but you cannot chain them together or use a USB hub (without putting third party firmware on the Live) so choose wisely.

Jay,

WD does make the 4TB Studio Editions. They can be set-up for 2TB (in RAID 1 mode) or 4TB. I have a couple of them and they work great. However, I’ve never tried connecting one directly to a WDTVLive+. I use them as my master storage and copy the files to a 1TB portable drive connected to the WDTVLive+ as needed.

Harlock

Highly recommend Unraid - you can mix match hard drives of any size (SATA or IDE) to build a raid that includes drive recovery. I have about 7TB of drive space and using 1.5TB of that as a parity drive for drive recovery. If you loose a drive the parity will automatically rebuild the raid. If you have a ton of drives lying around looking for a home and need disaster recovery then Unraid is for you :slight_smile:

http://lime-technology.com/

Rock solid system - no bloated OS (linux based). No need for a video card, keyboard or mouse on the system. Not even a boot drive is needed for the Unraid OS. The Unraid OS boots off a thumb drive. You control the entire Unraid syu

-Kat

Um, are you saying this works as a local drive (attached to the WD Live)?  Because there are a whole lot of just normal, regular desktop drives that don’t.  I’d be surprised (not amazed, but surprised) if the official firmware allowed this to work.

But if it does work for you, others should be aware they are proceeding at their own risk (like I said, my experience has been that even standard, WD drives don’t always work locally with the Live).

Hello Mike,

Unraid works flawlessly with WD Live - I know 3 other people who use this approach (not including myelf). The unraid sits on your local network and you can browse as networked computer from your WD live player with out any problems.

-Kat

meerkat154 wrote:

Hello Mike,

 

Unraid works flawlessly with WD Live - I know 3 other people who use this approach (not including myelf). The unraid sits on your local network and you can browse as networked computer from your WD live player with out any problems.

-Kat

So it does not actually attach to the WDTV its just a NAS.

richUK wrote:

 


meerkat154 wrote:

Hello Mike,

 

Unraid works flawlessly with WD Live - I know 3 other people who use this approach (not including myelf). The unraid sits on your local network and you can browse as networked computer from your WD live player with out any problems.

-Kat


So it does not actually attach to the WDTV its just a NAS.

 

Right…but a very smart NAS. Failover and you can mix/match drives of any size with blazing fast performance.

-Kat

Yeah, but that was my point – it’s not a local drive situation (which some folks want).

I agree that it is an alternative to a regular NAS, but don’t recommend it to folks who are looking for a local drive solution.

I bought one 1.5 TB WDElements drive, which I filled up right away.  I liked it so much that I bought another one for $10 more.  I had gotten the first one on sale.  I now have two 1.5 TB WDElement drives attached to my WD Live.  It’s great!  I can navigate through my movies, go to my favorite scene and really enjoy my TV shows without having to worry about commercials.

The only thing I found with the 1.5 TB WDElement drives was that they need to be reformatted prior to use with the WD Live.  I had an issue where the Live didn’t see them when plugged in.  All good, once reformatted.

So I’m converted! Thanks meerkat and mkelly.

I’ll wirelessly access the drive off the PC again till I get a NAS.

I’m definitely getting a NAS system though (super cool), and a new modem with wireless router and a dongle(?) for the WD to access it all or does it have built hardware?

Forgive my naivety.

You would need a USB wireless adapter for the Live if you do intend to network wireless (it doesn’t come with one).

If you get that far make sure you ask here which one to get, as there is an approved list of ones known to work (and many which do not).

Also consider networking via powerline network systems. This works very effectively for the live, espcially if  wireless networking is flakey due to walls etc.