HDD Options (Internal and External) - What Is Possible?

zekepliskin

Member
Hello everyone,

Longtime user of Humax kit here. I had a Foxsat HDR years ago and had the custom firmware installed, and now after moving out of the place into one where there's no satellite but a nice stable aerial on the room have dipped into using the HDR Fox T2.

Internal harddrive is already upgraded to 2TB, no issues to do that with the 1.03.12 firmware that came with the box. Already running 3.13 custom firmware, impressive piece of work that is, even more so than what was possible on the Foxsat HDR.

Now I notice that plugging in GPT drives with large capacities no longer cause the Humax to crash or boot loop if using the rear USB port now it's running custom firmware (I got it hang at the splash screen if using the front one). Specifically what I'm using at the moment is a 4TB drive with GPT, formatted with one NTFS partition, connected up by a fairly basic USB2 enclosure. Works perfectly on any other PC or Mac I choose to plug it into. However it will not mount on the Humax in any usable way, with the exception of the webif seeing gpt-drive1 and gpt-drive2 as 0 byte shares.

My first question would be, can this drive be reformatted in, say EXT3 as a single 4TB partition in GPT so the Humax can see it and use it and also mount it as a network share? If so how might I go about this?

The Very Large Hard Drive hummy.tv webpage states that using Maintenance Mode via telnet that drives over 2TB can be prepped and supported fairly easily. Elsewhere I read there's a potential maximum 16TB drive limit, which is plenty. We now have consumer 10TB drives on the market readily available from Amazon, such as a 10TB Seagate IronWolf model which although not a dedicated media type drive raises my next question. Could this 10TB drive be fitted to the HDR Fox T2, prepped in Maintenance Mode and used? Obviously I'd then want to put the drive into a PC and copy several TBs of stored content to it (stuff already recorded from my Foxsat HDR, stuff recorded by the HDR Fox T2 and things it won't play like my Blu-ray MKV backups which other streaming LAN devices could access and play) then reinsert it into the box, using it as an always on media server because copying TBs of data over USB2 would be painfully slow.

Any input here would be greatly appreciated before I start backing things up and reformatting etc in a trial an error attempt to get the box to do what I want.

As ever, a big thumbs up to everyone involved in the custom firmware project. Worth installing for so many reasons, including NFS support for streaming recorded TV shows.
 
Elsewhere I read there's a potential maximum 16TB drive limit, which is plenty.
Read more carefully. The suggested 16TiB limit is proposed as what could be possible using MBR (not GPT) and non-standard sector/cluster sizes. There is no practical limit for GPT.

However, GPT is only known to work for the internal drive. USB-connected drives have other obstacles to overcome, and so far I don't think enough progress has been made with them.

The reason for crashing with the front USB is probably power drain. There is no logical difference between front and rear USB port, but there may be slight variations in supply current capability.
 
Read more carefully. The suggested 16TiB limit is proposed as what could be possible using MBR (not GPT) and non-standard sector/cluster sizes. There is no practical limit for GPT.

However, GPT is only known to work for the internal drive. USB-connected drives have other obstacles to overcome, and so far I don't think enough progress has been made with them.

The reason for crashing with the front USB is probably power drain. There is no logical difference between front and rear USB port, but there may be slight variations in supply current capability.

Ah, well that makes sense. GPT on a large internal hard drive is encouraging though, certainly worth bearing in mind. I've been impressed with some initial copying of large Blu-ray backups to a USB2 250GB 2.5" drive formatted to NTFS, connected to the HDR Fox T2 and then streaming the result through to another wired device, in this case a Fire TV 1st Gen. Plays well, no issues with buffering even when sharing by SMB which is less efficient than NFS.

Side question actually. By default I can see USB HDD shares over SMB, but NFS shares I can't. How might I configure it to share any USB HDDs by NFS? It's probably quite easy but since I've only had the HDR Fox T2 since last Thursday I'm still learning how to use the custom firmware.
 
That's a difference between SMB and NFS. The external drives need to be explicitly configured in NFS.

The automatic sharing of USB drives in SMB can lead to problems - network mounts as virtual USB drives could result in an infinite recursion.
 
The problem is with large drives formatted as NTFS

Ah I see. Well I personally don't mind mounting large GPT formatted NTFS drives manually for now if ntfs-3g can handle it. Are we just using standard Linux command line syntax that I can easily find online or is there anything else going on? Because I tried a mount of the sdb1 partition where the drive is (noting that it's 2.2TB limited due to the 2^32) and ntfs-3g wouldn't have it even when called directly from shell.

EDIT: A-ha, I figured it out. I would post the link to where I found the solution but I can't yet (less than 10 posts) so it can be found by title :- "Mounting GPT Partitions On Raspberry Pi ZAY Blog".

It basically states that ntfs-3g can't mount GPT NTFS by default due to there being an "msftr" Mircosoft Reserved Partition at the start, so if your drive is sdb you can't mount the partition using sdb1, it's sdb2. Making a nice easy command line as long as you make a physical folder for it to mount to, in my case :-

humax# ntfs-3g /dev/sdb2 "/media/My Videos/ntfs4tb"

Voila. Mounts and is viewable in the webif, streamable across the network... nice workaround solution for now.

The next question is making this work on boot, are we able to add this to an fstab list or something?
 
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