I have a DVD Player (E-Boda 777) and a home cinema (Philips HTS 3154), both of them having USB input for memory sticks. All the time I wanted to add an external hard disk to them, but I ended with an error saying something like “Disk not supported”.
This was solved yesterday. I managed to make it readable, but just 196GB from my 500GB HDD. The reason why producers are saying that HDD are not supported is because putting lots of files on a HDD will increase accessing time.
Having a few hundred of files on it can mean 30-40 seconds till you folders/files list will appear on your screen.
Another problem would be disk format. Putting data on the inner part of your disk mean that your disk will rotate much more to retrieve the same amount of data than from the outer part of the disk. So you can experience some delays when you will play the movies that reside on the inner part of the disk.
Here are the general rules to make it work:
- In order to make the HDD supported you need to create a FAT32 partition.
- Don’t make the FAT32 partition bigger than 196GB.
- The FAT32 partition need to be the first one, from the first block
- The FAT32 partition need to be a Primary partition
- In order not to waste the space, you can create as many NTFS partitions on the remaining disk space
- Don’t convert or resize partitions, this will not work
- The best way would be to empty the HDD, delete all the partition table, then recreate everything from scratch
My way of working is storing everything on NTFS partitions, and just current playlist (like a season from a TV series or couple of recent movies) on the player-readable partition. I am moving things very easily from a partition to another, just connecting my laptop to the HDD.
A disk defragment from time to time is needed on order to keep files on a continuous disk allocation.
Good luck.
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