External HDD & MKV player

forever.insane

Hello,

Im going to order a Sumvision Cyclone Micro 2 Multi Media MKV Player Adaptor (on Ebuyer) and am looking for an external HDD's to save my films to but I also want make a small partition (100GB?) to backup my PC data.

The HDD I am looking at is 'Western Digital Elements 1TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive - Black' off Amazon (although also on Ebuyer) but need to check something.

It says Desktop external hard drive and the Amazon description says 'Preformatted for PCs'. Would I be able to connect this up to the MKV player and play my films or would I need to reformat it?

And any reccomendations for different hardware? The MKV player is £33.57 (includes delivery) and the HDD is £45.79 (free delivery).

Thank you.

banger9365

you would need to put the hdd in a enclosure and most off them for full size hdds have to be powered/pluged into the mains,

like these http://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=product/product.list.tpl&type=Enclosures&type_sub=3.5%20Enclosure
thier are over makes and cheeper ones out thier,

i have two for my Sumvision Cyclone mkv box but i use laptop ide hdds ,because they do not have to be powered from the mains like the full size ones
but i get laptop hdds free and use old hdds for the job ,and laptop ide hdds are not cheap,

BritRael

Good idea to make a backup. I have one of these Cyclone's, and it works great. However, 2 weeks ago, as usual I connected my external 1tb external HDD to it (containing over 600gb of movies) and it did not show any files. I then connected it to my desktop PC to see what the problem was and it was empty! Although I have everything backed up I wont be using this method again. In future, I will copy movies on to my 16gb pen drive so if there's a problem I can only lose a small amount.

kwikbreaks

An external 3.5 inch hard drive will be physically enormous in comparison to the player and will also have a power brick that will be bigger too. If that isn't an issue then 3.5 drives offer more capacity per £ than the much tidier 2.5 inch external drives which don't usually need an external power supply.

If any of the files you intend to play are bigger than 4GB then it will need to be formatted NTFS and you'll need to check that the media player can support that (the eBuyer site doesn't say).

Checkout some reviews to make sure the player can support and select between different language audio and subtitle tracks and indeed turn off unwanted subtitles. I know that some cheap players can't do this and if any of your files included those you'd have problems.

The report that a media player can corrupt a HDD is a bit worrying and I wonder if any recovery tools were tried to see if the data could be recovered?

forever.insane

banger9365 wrote: »

you would need to put the hdd in a enclosure and most off them for full size hdds have to be powered/pluged into the mains,

like these http://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=product/product.list.tpl&type=Enclosures&type_sub=3.5%20Enclosure
thier are over makes and cheeper ones out thier,

i have two for my Sumvision Cyclone mkv box but i use laptop ide hdds ,because they do not have to be powered from the mains like the full size ones
but i get laptop hdds free and use old hdds for the job ,and laptop ide hdds are not cheap,

Thank you. A review about the HDD says it has rubber feet (I believe nearly all desktop HDD's have some sort of enclosure unlike portables). Being powered by the mains isn't a problem either as the HDD won't constantly be in use. I can easily unplug something when I watch it.

BritRael wrote: »

Good idea to make a backup. I have one of these Cyclone's, and it works great. However, 2 weeks ago, as usual I connected my external 1tb external HDD to it (containing over 600gb of movies) and it did not show any files. I then connected it to my desktop PC to see what the problem was and it was empty! Although I have everything backed up I wont be using this method again. In future, I will copy movies on to my 16gb pen drive so if there's a problem I can only lose a small amount.

I'll keep this in mind. Sounds like a pretty big problem with over 600GB on it. Are you use it was the player? Maybe the HDD itself has a fault?

kwikbreaks wrote: »

An external 3.5 inch hard drive will be physically enormous in comparison to the player and will also have a power brick that will be bigger too. If that isn't an issue then 3.5 drives offer more capacity per £ than the much tidier 2.5 inch external drives which don't usually need an external power supply.

This isn't a problem. Below the TV isn't really a neat area anyway. I'm sure there's at least 50 redundant cables behind it.

kwikbreaks wrote: »

If any of the files you intend to play are bigger than 4GB then it will need to be formatted NTFS and you'll need to check that the media player can support that (the eBuyer site doesn't say).

This is something which I have been wondering about as well. Although it will be a problem, I should be able to split mkv's.

kwikbreaks wrote: »

Checkout some reviews to make sure the player can support and select between different language audio and subtitle tracks and indeed turn off unwanted subtitles. I know that some cheap players can't do this and if any of your files included those you'd have problems.

This also won't be a problem. I can easily get rid of any unwanted subtitles or audio tracks (I will remove any extra audio anyway to save space).

Thanks guys. Most of you have put my mind at rest.... lol. I'll have a little look around and order later today