First of all, sorry for this long post, but wanted to give all the information I thought it could be useful.
I have several WD Elements portable USB 3.0 disks, from 500 GB to 2TB, that I connect to my PC and to two USB 2.0 tv boxes/media players (Asus O!Play HDP-R1).
I keep using these old boxes/media players because they are actually very good, if you don’t use them for streaming, and they worked perfectly for years with 500 GB and 1 TB WD Elements portable disks. In fact they still do.
But I’m having problems with my 2TB portable disks. I used 4 disks of this capacity and 2 of them are failing after a few months of use.
In Crystaldiskinfo, these 2 disks show the error “Current pending sector count”. They have much louder scratchy sounds and the access time is much shower. They started having problems when they were connected the boxes. Each one started to fail on a different box. Two identical boxes with the same firmware.
The first disk started to fail after the player rebooted when trying to read a possibly damaged/ corrupt file. I though the problem was the corrupt file. This file disappeared form the disk, along with several other files.
But the second disk failed during normal use. One day I just turn on the box and I noticed the disk was making much louder scratchy sounds. I tested with Crystaldiskinfo on my PC, and It showed the same error.
A third 2Tb disk, sometimes is not detected by the media player, but works fine on my PC. Ironically, the 2 disks that failed never had detection problems.
On their webpage, Asus says the media player was tested with 2TB external disks. But they were probably desktop external disks, with their own power supply. In fact, when this media player came out, we only had portable disks up to 500 Gb.
I think the 2TB disks, need more power and the USB 2.0 connector can’t deliver it.
I noticed the disks only work with the original USB cables, when they are connected to the boxes. Is not just that they are not detected; they don’t even turn on. (But this happens also with the 500Gb and 1Tb models).
When I use a powered a USB 3.0 hub, the disks work even without the original cables. I use the same model I have on my desktop PC, a TP-LINK UH 720, which has a 4 Amp power supply
.
Also, I only connect one disk at a time, even without the USB hub (the media player has 2 USB 2.0 ports).
At this point, I don’t care about the failed disks. I have backups.
But I’d like to know if these problems could be caused by the box, and if it is safe to keep using 2TB disks with the USB hub connected to the box.
Thank You
Are you talking about the power supply on the USB hub?
I only tried a powered USB hub after these problems started, so it can be the cause.
Actually, I was a bit reluctant on using USB hubs, but they are going to be very hard to avoid in the future, because I’m switching form a laptop to a more powerful desktop PC, and there is no other practical way to connect portable HDD’s.
I thought about using the frontal USB ports at the top of my PC case, but not even the motherboard manufacturer was able to assure me that I could safely connect two portable HDDS’s at the same time. Also, I noticed the USB 3.0 Micro B Connector was bit stressed when the disks are connected this way. http://www.corsair.com/en-us/carbide-series-quiet-600q-inverse-atx-full-tower-case
I already used the usb hub, connecting two portable HDD’s, to make an extra backup for the failed disks, and it worked fine.
The PC back panel is not an option, so I guess I have to choose the lesser evil here. What do you recommend?
Perhaps it is time you transferred all the data you are streaming from individual drives to a My Cloud NAS with enough storage capacity for now and into the future. A NAS is so much better than using a computer with attached drives. Neither are necessary with a NAS since it is connected to your home network and nothing else…Even a PC can access it.
I thought about that, but what speed could I get over a 1Gbps Ethernet connection, when transferring the files?
Now I get between 80 and 100 MB/s, with USB 3.0, and I would be happy with that.
Also, I don’t feel very comfortable with RAID arrays.
Could I just star with a MY CLOUD PRO SERIES PR4100, and a single WD RED drive, and then keep adding drives, in JBOD, when I need more space.
I have a My Cloud DL2100 the series that preceded the PR Series. When I send video files from Win 10 PC through gigabit network, I get 113 Mbps; NAS specs are 115 Mbps. Not muxh dif. Maybe you need the PR2100 model with a cou;e of good size drives.
RAID is best for business purposes, but for a home server that has copies of all the data on other drives, pass on RAID and save the disk space… Just set up both drives as JBOD. I regret setting mine up as RAID1 and need to change to JBOD. Naybe you need the 4100 seriesl only you can decide, but I would set up two, and then add others if you need them.
Now, you can start doing your more in depth research on a NAS.
