Connect external hard drive to USB

[mikeycollins]

I have had a Toshiba 1tb hard drive connected to the USB port on my hub 5 and has operated without problems for two years. I have just bought a WD Mybook 3tb as a replacement but cannot access the drive, it is formatted NFTS. Below is the status page from the hub manager. Can anyone tell me what the problem is, please? 

My Home Network

Network Device MAC Address IP Address

Devices currently connected to your BT Home Hub:
2.4 GHz Wireless:	NP-2MA536004825	ac:3a:7a:8c:2e:69	192.168.1.71
	android-ef7ec8e6b...	94:fb:b2:7e:04:a0	192.168.1.144
5 GHz Wireless:	No devices detected
Ethernet:	udhcp-0-9-9-pre-9...	98:93:cc:19:48:27	192.168.1.64
	HUMAX	08:eb:74:9d:24:a0	192.168.1.65
	udhcp-0-9-9-pre-c...	c8:02:10:61:8a:f8	192.168.1.195
USB:	USB 1 (File type not supported)			Safely disconnect

[smf22]

There's a historical disk partition size limitation of 2.2TB and perhaps this is your issue.

If you Google along the lines of partition size limit 2.2tb you'll see a number of posts related to this limit. The articles Understanding the 2 TB Limit in Windows Storage and GPT and the 2.2TB Barrier gives some background on the 2.2TB limitation.

Do you know the sector size used during the format? If it's 512 byte sectors that could be the issue. Perhaps try and reformat using 4096 byte sectors to see if that resolves the problem. The other thing to try is to create two partitions, one of 1TB and a second of 2TB.

Regards

[mikeycollins]

Thanks,  I will look into that later but I thought NTFS overcame any limits. 

[smf22]

Hi,

Not according to Understanding the 2 TB Limit in Windows Storage post. If you look at the Number of Clusters section of this post it states:

"The second limitation is harder to spot.  It is a limitation of NTFS.  NTFS is limited to (2^32 -1) clusters….no matter what.  The smallest cluster size possible is 512 bytes (1 sector).  So again the math leaves us at 2,199,023,255,040 or 2TB."

Good luck.

Regards