WDtv "no storage attached"

[Captain315]

I have two 1.5 tb disks that are combined via "BIG" but when I hook it up to the WDtv box, it shows there is no storage present. The combined disks show up fine on my computer. I used a single drive with WDtv and it worked fine. Is there a trick to using a pair of combined drives?

[jman98]

What exactly is "BIG"? I did a Google search and didn't find any links quickly that explained it and I'm not going to spend 15+ minutes digging through every possible match about this. I'm guessing that you are referring to some kind of RAID technology with this term. I have no way to test, but it would seem to me that perhaps the WD TV does not support RAID. I have a first generation one and I don't recall seeing anything that indicated that it would support this.

[Captain315]

Most external drive enclosures allow you to access the disks as single drives or combine them into one BIG drive. It is similar to a RAID configuration but without all the hassle. It is becoming very popular. My two 1.5tb show up on the computer as a 2.8tb single drive.

[rumplestiltskin]

I would suggest posting at the WDTV forum and ask the question: "How big a volume will the WDTV see?" It is possible the designers of the device didn't consider anything larger than (fill in a size here) and the device will require a firmware update in order to handle your spanned volumes.

[lowellriggsiam]

From what I have read in the past anybody that partitioned their large HDDs and attached them to their WMPs found that only the first partition was seen by the device, I suspect them that the device gets confused when viewing you configuration. The reason your computer sees it would be that they are more adept at discovery which they are designed to do as part of being user friendly.

[nic2k4]

You're talking about a software RAID type of setup. Obviously if the software doesn't run on a device it won't be able to access the drives. With any RAID configuration other than Mirrored (RAID1), the inidividual drives aren't accessible on their own. It may be different with JBOD configurations, I've never tried that. The single drive you tried with the WD Player, was it one of those two 1.5 TB?

[Captain315]

Yes, when it was on JBOD (single drives) it showed up and ran the movies fine. It just wouldn't let me access the other 1.5 drive that was installed. This is why I formatted them to BIG mode so that I would have one huge drive rather than the two individual drives. That's when the trouble began.

[rumplestiltskin]

Yes, when it was on JBOD (single drives) it showed up and ran the movies fine. It just wouldn't let me access the other 1.5 drive that was installed. This is why I formatted them to BIG mode so that I would have one huge drive rather than the two individual drives. That's when the trouble began.

So you need to get advice from WD and that's where their user forums come in (or post a tech support ticket there and let us know what you find out).

[jman98]

Thanks for the explanation. Please note that RAID and BIG require special support in software and/or hardware. You're dealing with a device in the WDTV that has limited amounts of firmware and yes, I can certainly understand that it doesn't support RAID or BIG devices.

I finally found a definition for BIG. Basically it's RAID 0 without any size limitations, so you can combine multiple drives of any size and use the entire disks. RAID 0 just uses the size of the smallest drive on all drives and any extra space is unused. Do note that there is no redundancy of any kind in BIG. If you lose a drive, the entire BIG setup and everything in it is gone. So I guess the reason I've never heard of it (I work in IT but not in data storage) is that BIG is completely useless for our company's needs and we don't use it.

The suggestion to ask on a WD forum is worthwhile, but I can't imagine any reason why this would be supported now or any time soon, if ever. Don't get your hopes up. I'm not sure exactly what you think you are gaining by using BIG. Now you've got a single point of failure on BOTH drives. If one drive fails, you've lost everything on BOTH drives, whereas if they were separate drives and one failed, the other would not lose its data.

[Captain315]

I appreciate the replies, I really do. The purpose of trying to use the BIG option is that the WDtv will only recognize the first drive in an enclosure. The second one is useless. I have four 1.5 disks, two to use and two for backup. I can divide the drives into two separate enclosures and connect them to the WDtv but it requires getting out of one drive and loading the other to get to the other files. This is what I may have to do. I wish I knew if the WDlxtV version of firmware for the WDtv would allow me to do this. I can't seem to find out and I'm afraid that I wouldn't be able to revert to the official firmware if something went wrong. It's hard to find information about it. I will go on the forum and see what they have to say.

[rumplestiltskin]

This may be wishful thinking but didn't I see somewhere that a powered USB hub would work with the WDTV?

[Captain315]

Yes, if you use the WDlxTV version of the firmware. However, that would still require closing one drive and opening another. It still would not work the way I'm trying to get it to. I'd like all my movies to be in one place for searching, etc..

[bjunior910]

Captain, were you able to find a solution for this problem? I am hoping to use my similar two-drive enclosure to work the same way you described. I want to view all movies in one place rather than disconnect drives or navigate to another folder.

I apologize if this has already been resolved via another thread. Any help would be much appreciated!

[MJA]

I think it's a hardware limitation more than a firmware update

[Captain315]

I just received two new powered hubs today. I will give them a try in the very near future and will let you know what I find out. Someone else has probably tried this already. Maybe they will give us an update.

[bjunior910]

I flashed my WDTV Live with the WDLXTV firmware and i am able to see both drives in my enclosure. (It's worth mentioning that I could not get this to work with the original firmware.) I still can't get the videos from both drives to show up in one spot, but I've pretty much given up on that.

Ultimately, i think that this is pretty similar to a USB hub configuration, so I would assume that the powered hubs would work fine to at least get your drives to show up in one spot (using unofficial firmware). Having the media all in one spot is probably the next step.

Ultimately, the issue is organization, and when I thought about it, i have a decent amount of TV shows and movies, and i dont really want them all showing up alphabetically in the same place. So I figure one HDD can be for TV shows and the other can be for movies and i can keep things organized that way.

[Captain315]

I tried the powered hub thing last night but the same situation happened to me that happened to you.

[branch]

From what I have read in the past anybody that partitioned their large HDDs and attached them to their WMPs found that only the first partition was seen by the device, I suspect them that the device gets confused when viewing you configuration. The reason your computer sees it would be that they are more adept at discovery which they are designed to do as part of being user friendly.

I read that too, so I was surprised when I partitioned a 2TB disk into two halves of 1TB and both appeared.

Guess 1TB is considered small these days.

[RabidDog]

If you use one of the custom firmwares (I use wdlxtv) you should be able to see your two individual drives. What enclosure are you using? I have two disks in a single enclosure and both show up using the custom firmware. I too think that "BIG" sounds like a bit of a waste of time, and more prone to failure leading to you losing everything on both disk drives. For backup just copy all your files to a seperate hard disk ... Not as sexy as a NAS or as geeky as RAID1, but infinitely safer and easily recovered anywhere, on any system.

[Captain315]

Thanks for replying RabidDog. I have two (double drive) enclosures, both are Rosewell ATA R2 models. If I put two drives in one of them, only one of the drives will show up. I'm with you and a couple of others on here that BIG is not the way to go. I do have all my drives backed up and will continue to do so but that doesn't solve my dilemma. I installed the WXLt firmware but it didn't help. Is the a particular version of that firmware that you are using?

[RabidDog]

My two drives are formatted with one partition on each, in NTFS and accessed via One USB. I use wdlxtv firmware or official firmware 1.02.07 (IIRC) still supported USB hubs. I suspect your drives are still raided and would need to be reformatted (JBOD?) the wd will recognize FAT32 also. If you read the posts on wdtv forum they will guide you thru the process of downgrading your firmware on the wdtv. can you send me over a crate of lagers (heineken export?) as I am gasping for a drink, its all this Volcanic dust, its getting dahn me froat..

[bjunior910]

I am using B-Rad's latest version of the WDLXTV Live 0.4.1.9-6. I would try unplugging the WDTV and then plugging in the drive before re-booting. This usually will allow me to see both drives. I am using a Vantec Nexstar MX-400-SR with two Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drives. Everything works fine and both drive show up everytime.

[Captain315]

Thanks for the info bj. I will download that and see if it will work. Will also try what you had to say Rabid. What you are doing is what I'm trying to do and that is use two drives in one enclosure and attach them through the two usb slots on the WDtv. Four 1.5 TB drives would give me all the space I'll need. I might mention that the drives I'm using have never been combined into one using any type of software. These are brand new, along with the enclosures except that I've quick formatted them as NTFS.