Connectivity with WD TV LIVE, Just want to know if certain products are compatible with WD TV LIVE Options

[Teja]

Hai guys. U have been extremely generous and replied to my previous post. Thank you.

But now I'm in a dilemma. There is Samsung G2 Portable external Hdd for 75$ three year warranty in Dandenong Market and there is WD 1TB elements Hard drive for 78$ for 1 year warranty. And I don't know if they are compatible with WD TV Live HD media player. (if u know please answer)
Or should I buy a enclosure for 30$. I have 575gb free space of 1Tb Seagate internal hdd
So guys please give me some opinions. It's portable vs External vs enclosure

Reason for edit: Merged post from other thread

[WDUser]

Unless someone has specifically used those drives with the Live, they will never be able to 100% confirm compatibility. So I don't really know what to say. IMO any good drive should work. Just stay away from > 2 TB drives and Advanced Format drives (these are anyway > 2 TB). As long as it is partitioned and formatted in a standard way using a supported file system (see this thread for more), the HDD should work.

[Teja]

Ok man thank you very much. So can u please if I should buy the Portable Samasung G2 hard drive or would you buy a WD elements 1Tb hard drive. Let's say I don't take my hard drives out.
I like portable hard drives but I heard a lit of people saying they are easily voided and become corrupt.
But i bought a External Hdd before and I broke my enclosure, then I brought a new one it broke too.
ATM it's in my computer. What would you have done?
Please answer me. DONT give DIPLOMATIC answers. Reply ASAP

[WDUser]

I don't give diplomatic answers, ok? I just don't want to specifically recommend a product when I have no experience with it. Suppose I tell you to buy something, you do and next thing you know it breaks. What then? Won't you blame me?

Look, people buy drives all the time. Many shops have a return/exchange policy, and even if they don't, you can always try telling them that your player is finicky about the drives it accepts, so you'd like to test the HDD for compatibility and will return it immediately in its original packaging if it doesn't work.

As for what I've done, I have a whole bunch of external HDDs that I use with my player. None of them has a cheap enclosure. I have externally-powered 3.5" Seagate FreeAgents mostly (500 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB, 2 TB) and also a few USB-powered 2.5" Toshiba drives. All work fine, no issues whatsoever. I have also from time to time used many different pen drives (1 GB to 16 GB) when I was carrying the player over to a friend's place.

A tip: All HDDs eventually fail. I have used all the major brands and there is absolutely no guarantee that any drive you buy will not fail sooner rather than later, even if another HDD of the same brand lasted for years. If possible, try finding out the exact HDD used inside the Samsung and read reviews about it. If they're more +ve than -ve, then personally I would consider it since more warranty's always good and the $3 difference is negligible.

[Rev Drew]

I have several different brand and model 1TB internal drives, I use a good quality HDD dock, I have 1 at my PC and another at my WDTV-Live.
I also have several flash drives, up to 16GB. for me an external drive in an enclosure is a waste of time (I am lazy), enough that I am considering building a computer just to store this stuff on and share it all on the network.

there is no right, wrong or magic answer. 2TB or smaller is the only real limitation we are aware of for directly connected drives, network drives are a different story and any size 'should' work fine..

FWIW, I prefer Seagate sv series drives, they are designed for 100% up time and are used in many security camera systems for storing surveillance video, I know this as I used to build, install and maintain many of these and that particular drive had way less issues than any other drive I have ever used. In fact I just rebuilt my own security camera system between Christmas and New Years and it has 2 of those drives in it (250GB for XP, 1TB for the video). the last time I did any (major) work on it was 5 years prior and it was just ordinary hard drives (2 X 80GB), I expect these ones to last as long if not longer, but with less troubles and more up time.
fan cooling does help with drive life, trust me. keep it under 40 C and you will have a happy long life drive. my OS drive runs around 37 (a little warm for me), the video drive is around 33

they are marginally more expensive than other drives but for quality and durability, I buy them without regard to the price.
and no, I do not use any of them with my WDTV, how is that for oddness..

you buy what works for you and a name you trust, then trust the manufacturer that it will last, that's all any of us can do, all hard drives WILL eventually fail, it's inevitable.