4TB External HD with TV

[[TC]»Elmo«]

Well, the page you link answers the question pretty well in the most part:

Quote:The solution is a harsh one: you'll have to re-partition the drive so that it uses an MBR (Master Boot Record) partition instead. This is not an ideal solution because it means that only up to 2TB of space will be usable on a 3TB or 4TB hard drive. This space will be wasted, but at least now there will be a chance that your new drive will be detected and read by your TV.

All data on the disk will be erased if you attempt to change the drive's partition type from GPT to MBR, so you should make sure that you have a copy of all your data on another drive prior to changing it.

However, there *might* be a solution that works (depending on the actual reason for the 2TB limit):
Again, you will need to format the drive (backup/data loss etc), but if you choose MBR and 4KB sectors, that should allow MBR to fully address the disk and *might* allow the TV to see it as well.

That is of course if you need to directly connect that HDD to the TV.
If your TV is anything like mine, you could plug it in to the LAN instead and serve files to it over the network from a PC/media server using DLNA. No formatting required, you just need to have the PC switched on when you want to watch something off it.


For anyone interested in why the specific limit is 2TB (a number which shows up in a lot of places, some HDD caddies included):

Spoiler (Click to View)

2TB is the amount space addressable by a 32bit address space (like MBR) on a drive with 512byte sectors (2^32 * 512). 512byte sectors used to be the standard (and still is for smaller drives). However, for drives greater than that 2TB limit, 512B won't do. Drives >2TB now use 4kB sectors, which raises the max capacity for basic 32bit addressing systems (ie MBR) to 16TB, which should do for now. GPT is 64bit based, so can handle a silly capacity (64 zettabytes).