Media Player + HDD suggestions

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  jarris on 15/06/2010 - 04:37

  Would the WD Elements 1TB work well for this purpose? $95 at OW.

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    ESEMCE on 15/06/2010 - 07:19

    Elements isn't a Media player, it's just a Hard Drive.
    It would be fine as a Hard drive for a USB capable Media Player but it will need its own power supply which is annoying. Personally I'd go for a 2.5" Hard Drive that is USB powered so the drive will power down with the Media Player and wont take up a power supply.
    There's a 750Gb 2.5" drive at Officeworks for $128. 500Gb can be had at under $100

    As for media players, there are heaps of options out there that will accept any USB Hard Drive (or Flash Drive). You wont find many that have a hard drive built in for less than $150 though.

    Probably best you can hope for at <$150 is any "no-name Chinese brand" (Noontec and Astone are a couple that spring to mind) cheap media player for around $50-60 plus a 320Gb 2.5" Hard Drive for $80ish.

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  jarris on 15/06/2010 - 08:35

  Oh I know, but for the HDD component. The reason why I suggest powered is because I already have an Astone media player which doesn't want to accept my USB disks. I figured if a powered one would work, then I wouldn't need another media player.

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  greenie4242 on 15/06/2010 - 09:56

  Weird that the Astone player doesn't accept USB disks, I have one here that has so far worked with every USB device I've tried. The rear-mounted port doesn't work, but the front one does. I think the back USB port is only for the wireless USB dongle.

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  Mikinoz on 15/06/2010 - 09:59

  get a dvico then

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  greenie4242 on 15/06/2010 - 10:01

  I just remembered, if your USB drives are formatted Mac HFS, the Astone won't read them. I don't think any media player in existence will read Mac formatted drives. You have to specifically format them as either FAT-32 or NTFS, which are Windows formats. Unfortunately with FAT-32 you're limited to 4GB file sizes (which is only a problem if you have lots of HD media) but if you use NTFS your Mac can't write to the hard drive. You can download an NTFS driver for the Mac but it's super-dodgy and people have reported file loss before and hard drive corruption if the hard drive isn't safely ejected from Windows before being mounted on a Mac. The situation is very annoying but there's not much we can do about it at this stage.

  Would a wireless player work, or are you planning to carry the media player + HDD around all over the place?

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    ESEMCE on 15/06/2010 - 11:40

    xbox 360 does (read HFS+ formatted disks)… if you count that as a media player.
    On the contrary, I don't think any media player at all will read an NTFS drive (not even Microsoft's own xbox 360!!)

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      Mikinoz on 15/06/2010 - 11:55

      my dvico does read ntfs no problem and so do most, "what you on about scuba"

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        ESEMCE on 15/06/2010 - 14:46

        Talking out of my a$$ apparently… :-)
        100% confirm that the 360 can read HFS+ but not NTFS, and took a leap of faith that it was because Microsoft wouldn't license NTFS to anyone (or something), not even themselves!

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          Mikinoz on 15/06/2010 - 14:50

          @ESEMCE: you had me fooled till i rechecked my sanity , which is questionable at best :)

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    jarris on 15/06/2010 - 15:52

    Ok Greenie, how do I check the formatting of a drive on a Mac? What app do I need to check/rewrite?

    I actually planned on loaning out the drive for a few weeks, but also looking for a cheapie media player and a USB HDD for someone else.

    EDIT: Paragon at least allows me to edit an NTFS drive on the Mac. Just about to try a mac formatted drive with it.

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      greenie4242 on 19/06/2010 - 08:38

      I wasn't aware the Paragon driver had been updated - they used to say that you needed to eject the hard drive from a Windows computer before plugging it into a Mac, otherwise it could corrupt the drive. They appear to have fixed that problem because the website doesn't mention that limitation anymore, which is great. Pity it costs US$40 but at least it lets you fully access Windows hard drives.

      For a media player, you might be lucky to pick up one of these, but they're probably all out of them by now:
      http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/24896

      If Bing Lee don't have any left you can try other places:
      http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/24952

      Edit: Don't have access to a Mac here but from memory you highlight a hard disk on the Mac desktop and do a 'Get Info' from the file menu, that should tell you the format of the hard disk.

      • 

        jarris on 19/06/2010 - 12:16

        Well, I think NTFS-3G is similar.
        http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

        In Disk Utility under 'Erase', you just set the format to NTFS-3G and hit 'Erase'. Did the trick for me!

        For option #1 that's the mini which I believe doesn't play all formats - still could be good, #2… 28 negs?

        Anyhow for now all is working, so I'll hang out for another bargain. Thanks for your help!