WD Player not seeing USB3 drive? Options

[cslogg]

I have a WD 2nd gen player and up to now have been using a usb2 powered external 250g hard drive with no problems.
I have recently bought a 500g usb3 powered drive and the wd does not seem to "see" it.
It has been suggested to me that the usb3 one needs more power to drive it and the wd cannot do this.
Any idea if this is true and is there a way round it ?

Thanks
cslogg

[Rev Drew]

a USB3 host can provide twice the current that USB2 can, the USB3 drives take advantage of this, you are effectively going to kill your WDTV device trying to run a USB3 drive from the USB2 bus!

as for a way around it, ALWAYS use a powered USB drive with your WDTV, bus powered drives will shorten the life of your device.

[ezeechair]

My WDTV - Live opens my 3TB "My Book" essential drive (powered drive - USB3) no problem.

When it is connected to my WDTV - HD Gen 2 it is not recognized. My WD 2-TB USB3 drive (no external power) is recognized.

I thought USB3 was backward compatible to USB2. Does anyone know what gives?
Is it max drive size issue for the older WDTV Gen 2?

[ezeechair]

It's too bad that the documentation and packaging specs do not mention anything about the maximum drive size supported which is 2 gigs for the WDTV - HD Gen 2. Even the web site doesn't seem to mention supported drive size in their specs. You would think that would be an important piece of info.

[WDUser]

At the time the Gen. 2 first came out, 2TB drives were a rarity (or perhaps not even released). When they did come out, it was noticed that the player FW was incompatible with them and even caused data loss in some cases. Naturally the newer models received FW updates fixing this (see this thread), but the older ones were left in the lurch.