External USB Drive as a Media Center for ATV

[s1lv3r]

Hey Guys,

Recently I bought a new router RT-N56U and a 3Tb Go Flex Desk Hard Drive.

Unfortunately, I didn't know that the biggest drive size supported by the router USB is 2Tb and I can't return any of them

Reading thru the internet, I found out some other guys with the same problem. Some of them partitioned the drive into 2Tb + 1 Tb and then the router can mount both partitions. Probably will set the Time Machine on the smaller partition and keep the 2Tb for my files.

My main concern is about partition formats and I can't find any info on that. I don't know which one to use. I'll be using the files (most mkv's, mp3's and photos) on my Apple TV 2 + XBMC and on my rMBP. Its good to keep compatibility to Windows too as i'm the only one using OSX here.

Most of my MKV's are bigger than 4Tb, so using the universal FAT32 won't solve the problem. Should I use exFAT or NTFS (compressed or not?), or stay to MAC OS Expanded? I'd use NTFS, but I read that NTFS is much slower than FAT32, would it be a problem for me? What do you guys recommend?

Thanks!

 

[brand]

Hey Guys,

Recently I bought a new router RT-N56U and a 3Tb Go Flex Desk Hard Drive.

Unfortunately, I didn't know that the biggest drive size supported by the router USB is 2Tb and I can't return any of them

Reading thru the internet, I found out some other guys with the same problem. Some of them partitioned the drive into 2Tb + 1 Tb and then the router can mount both partitions. Probably will set the Time Machine on the smaller partition and keep the 2Tb for my files.

My main concern is about partition formats and I can't find any info on that. I don't know which one to use. I'll be using the files (most mkv's, mp3's and photos) on my Apple TV 2 + XBMC and on my rMBP. Its good to keep compatibility to Windows too as i'm the only one using OSX here.

Most of my MKV's are bigger than 4Tb, so using the universal FAT32 won't solve the problem. Should I use exFAT or NTFS (compressed or not?), or stay to MAC OS Expanded? I'd use NTFS, but I read that NTFS is much slower than FAT32, would it be a problem for me? What do you guys recommend?

Thanks!

How are you going to fit your 4 terabit videos on the 3 terabit hard drive you said you have.

I assume that you know that a 3 terabit hard drive is actually 384 gigabytes?

 

[waw74]

I'm going to try to have some smarts and assume you simply typo-ed and meant 4GB, not Tb. as a 4Tb video file would be way way past what any consumer would have.

The drive format only matters to the device that it is directly plugged into.
You'll need to look at the router specs and see what it supports.

without access to the manual, i'm guessing you're going to have to use NTFS

File sharing uses different formats than drive formats.
There are 2 main ones AFP (apple) and Samba (windows, sometimes you'll see this as SMB).
Macs will do samba, but windows will not do AFP. (there might be software to accomplish this, not sure, but i'm speaking for a fresh OS install)

The file sever (in your case the router) will act as a translator between the drive format and the sharing format. Your computer will never see the format on the drive itself.

If you plan on moving the drive from the router to a local drive on your computer, then you would need a format that is compatible with both.

 

[hafr]

Hey Guys,

Recently I bought a new router RT-N56U and a 3Tb Go Flex Desk Hard Drive.

Unfortunately, I didn't know that the biggest drive size supported by the router USB is 2Tb and I can't return any of them

Reading thru the internet, I found out some other guys with the same problem. Some of them partitioned the drive into 2Tb + 1 Tb and then the router can mount both partitions. Probably will set the Time Machine on the smaller partition and keep the 2Tb for my files.

My main concern is about partition formats and I can't find any info on that. I don't know which one to use. I'll be using the files (most mkv's, mp3's and photos) on my Apple TV 2 + XBMC and on my rMBP. Its good to keep compatibility to Windows too as i'm the only one using OSX here.

Most of my MKV's are bigger than 4Tb, so using the universal FAT32 won't solve the problem. Should I use exFAT or NTFS (compressed or not?), or stay to MAC OS Expanded? I'd use NTFS, but I read that NTFS is much slower than FAT32, would it be a problem for me? What do you guys recommend?

Thanks!

According to this site (http://event.asus.com/2009/networks/disksupport/) your router supports disks in the ext3 format. Ext3 has the advantage that it won't fragment the files until the drive is something like 90-95 % full, therefore you won't risk any degradation of the disk's performance as you will with exFAT or NTFS. So my advice to you is to format it in ext3 when you partition it

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How are you going to fit your 4 terabit videos on the 3 terabit hard drive you said you have.

I assume that you know that a 3 terabit hard drive is actually 384 gigabytes?

Dude... What about being helpful instead of trying to be funny?

 

[waw74]

So my advice to you is to format it in ext3 when you partition it

I agree, EXT3 is the better option.

What about being helpful instead of trying to be funny?

really wasn't funny.

 

[brand]

What about being helpful instead of trying to be funny?

I wasn't trying to be funny. Specifics matter.

 

[hafr]

I wasn't trying to be funny. Specifics matter.

Actually it doesn't, what matters is that what is trying to be said is understood. Good communication is all about the recipient understanding the information being transmitted. Since he's not trying to teach anyone anything, but rather be taught, and the fact that his mistakes are so obvious for anyone that would be able to help him had he not made those mistakes - the mistakes are not causing any communication problems.

But I'm curious. Did you really not understand what he meant?