Largest External Hard drive for a U4

[Mr Electrickery]

Hi Every Body,
I am wondering what the largest external Hard drive My U4 can take, I bought a 18 TB an d it wont let me Format it ,works fine on my PC, so doesnt seem to be a problem with it, Thanks
Ps i should have asked this question before bought it

[MrQuade]

Whatever the problem is, it won't be the capacity. The U4 supports practically unlimited size disks (like in the exabyte range).

You may want to try deleting all the partitions from the disk using your PC before trying to use it on the U4 in case there is something whacky going on with the partition table.

Make sure the disk is getting adequate power as well.

[IanL-S]

Very large disk can use different technology to smaller disks, which raises the possibility that the Linux kernel used by the U4 does not recognize the disk structure so cannot format it using ext4. Never encountered this myself, but the largest HDD I have is 10TB.

[peteru]

32 bit Linux ext4 tools have issues with filesystems larger than 16TB. You probably won't run into these problems, as they mostly manifest when modifying an existing filesystem. However, it is also conceivable that fsck may have problems repairing a filesystem larger that 16TB.

For Beyonwiz, I'd recommend keeping directly attached drives to 16TB or smaller, to be safe. You can use larger drives, but you should definitely ensure you are running the latest firmware before you format the drive on the Beyonwiz.

Network attached drives can be much larger, 80+TB are known to work with the T4.

[Mr Electrickery]

could some body please explain to me how to make my external hard drive my main recording drive. Iam sure I have done it before but cant figure it out. Thank you in advance

[prl]

MENU>Setup>TV>Recording settings>Default movie location

[gawaterman]

Is there any performance limitations if you use the usb interface for you main drive?

[IanL-S]

I would not expect there to be any performance issues. The V2 does not support internal HDD/SSD. I have been using mine with a 4TB Seagate USB 3 HDD for many years without major performance issues. Sometimes it is a little slow listing drive contents, but that can happen with my T2 which has an internal drive.

When I have been away for extended periods I have used a Seagate 6TB powered USB 3 HDD with my U4. Was not using it to watch content and the like, but it successfully did the recordings for the 4 weeks I was away.

[gawaterman]

Sorry,didn't notice this was for a U4. I have a T4 (and a V2) so was wondering if there was a performance difference between an internal and usb hdd in a T4?

[ShawnK]

Hi Every Body,
I am wondering what the largest external Hard drive My U4 can take, I bought a 18 TB an d it wont let me Format it ,works fine on my PC, so doesnt seem to be a problem with it, Thanks
Ps i should have asked this question before bought it

Wow, what a huge external hard drive. I'm thinking of getting one of those too. Let me ask you. Is its speed different from smaller drives?

[peteru]

In my experience, 20TB drives are much faster than 4TB or 8TB drives. For use with Beyonwiz, any of those sizes are more than fast enough.

[ShawnK]

In my experience, 20TB drives are much faster than 4TB or 8TB drives. For use with Beyonwiz, any of those sizes are more than fast enough.

Thank you

[peteru]

In my experience, 20TB drives are much faster than 4TB or 8TB drives. For use with Beyonwiz, any of those sizes are more than fast enough.

Just to put some numbers to that statement. Running a full disk scrub on a Linux server gives these speeds:

2.5" 1TB WD Blue SATA: 73.86MiB/s
3.5" 8 TB WD Red Plus SATA: 182.97MiB/s
3.5" 20 TB WD Red Pro SATA: 214.42MiB/s

All of these figures are well in excess of what is required for a PVR that is dealing with several service being recorded and playing back at the same time.

A typical Australian DVB-T service broadcast will not exceed 2MiB/s, even in HD.