Large USB Drives help needed please!! [ Edited ]

[mattpeds]

Hi I'm looking at buying a drobo which is a 4 bay usb drive with raid that offers upto 16tb of data storage...

I have seen threads that state that the WD TV Live HUb corrupts data on drives larger than 2tb and does not work with them. Is this the case?

Thank you  for any advise!

Matt

[Ardvark]

That was an issue with a very old version of firmware. See the link below:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5875

[mattpeds]

perfect i didnt know if there was a new limit on size of drive...

DROBO works on array of drives and will be seen as one large drive hopefully will be compatible..

thanks for your help

[TheCoolDude]

Hi Matt. I just wanted to let you know to be careful which Drobo you decide to get. Only the Drobo FS and Drobopro offer network connectivity. The Drobo and Drobo S only offer FireWire and USB connectivity. Cheer.

[HD_HOBBIT]

Interesting! So which Drobo offers the best speed & relaiablilty, plus the ability of the auto content find feature that the Live hub now uses to populate the Drobo with metadata? 

In the same boat with a few 2 TB drives

Thanks

[mattpeds]

HI

Dude - yes I was aware - budget doesnt stretch to the s let alone any of the network ones!

Thanks for advise - i'm going for the standard Drobo that uses USB & firewire as they are slightky faster than the neworkones I am told. Although data transfer is slower on drobo to some nas drives they seem to be solid a have met and spoken with several people who have them and they have nothing but praise for the product.

with regards to the auto content thing - i havent a clue! to be honest I dont really understand......

[tsandayu]

I have the DroboFS(2 in fact), as far as speed is concerned they work OK for streaming.  I have read that for real speed I should have used faster drives( I use some old 2TB drives that I ripped out of my WD USB drives).

As far as the Media Lib. is concerned I have to leave that feature off, as when it is on the WDHub dumps its settings after about a third of the way thru indexing my TV shows(over 26,000 files).  I use WDTVHubGen to create my XML's and JPG's.

[TheCoolDude]

I would suggest you do a bit more research before ditching $400+ on a Drobo and more $ to fill it with HDs.  NAS give you the ability to be accessible from any devices / computers on your network, as long as you have a router (wireless better).   D-Link make decent NAS which will cost you less than half of a Drobo.  I also read that when data corruption hit a Drobo,  it will most likely corrupt all files stored on it.  So beware.   But still do more research.  I'm not trying to influence you decision, just make a educated one.   On the subject of transfer speed,  I get around 7.2 MB/s wirelessly and top at 10 MB/s wired to the NAS or the LiveHub.  My router is a D-Link DIR-655  running on a CAT 5 wired network.  I upgraded the antenna with the D-Link ANT24-0230 Xtreme N 2.4 GHZ which as greatly increase the range.  Cheer!

[mattpeds]

ts

thanks for the comment do you know what spped your drives are? i was looking at wd caviar green drives 5900 rpm. a mate of mine uses drobo connected via usb to his pc upstairs and uses xbox to stream movies to an xbox via cat 5 with out a problem..

... when you say it is ok what are the drawbacks??

[mattpeds]

Dude

thanks for your advise...   ...again!

I can stream to xbox from the hub with a usb drive connected to it and works perfectly (granted not a drobo). I'm running all my network via cat 5 so speed shouldnt be an issue. I would think the drobo would be accessable via network through the wd hub. afterall you can run other hubs and share data from a usb drve attached.

I have all my music on a usb drive attached to my hub and have an apple tv in another room and that works perfectly so im a little confused about the network avaliability you mention.

with regards to reliability i'm looking at a few different options i was looking at http://www.ebuyer.com/150457-d-link-dns-343-sharecenter-4-bay-no-disks-nas-enclosure-dns-343 was this the one you were referring to?

thanks again for all your help and advice