I have a question i thought i recall reading something here on the forums that we can't use ext hdd's bigger than 2TB with our mini is that true? i can't see why that would be true but i am looking at buying a 4TB ext hdd coz the 2TB's are filling up way too fast & it's getting messy with all these ext's & their power supplies i've run out of spots even with my 6way board.

this is what i'm going to get http://www.officeworks.com.au/retail/pr ... SGTC4000BK

i just wanna make sure before i spend $300 bcoz it is specifically for playing files on my mini i would have no use it for it otherwise & i can't afford to waste $300, thanx.

Only a few days ago I saw a happy 3TB external drive owner, but do not ask me to find the post again.
I have not seen successful 4TB drives yet.
Drives > 2TB are not officially supported, so it is trial and error or luck. Take your Mini to your vendor and check before you buy.

You could also buy a USB hub and attach several 2 TB drives to be on the safe side. I realize, however, that this is less cost efficient.

thanx for the reply. can you tell me what the issues are that people are facing with these larger hdd's? i'm just curious is the problem that the player doesn't recognize the hdd's & they just don't work at all? or they work but it's poor playback issues or something like that?

that is actually what i have been using for a while now a 4 port usb hub but it's getting messy already & it's only going to get worse with more ext hdd's. lot of my movies are remux's so we're talking 20-35gbs per file & as you can imagine that fills up 2TB very quickly so a 4TB would be ideal but not if it won't work

I suppose it might be possible to try it before i buy.

I do not know the experience of other people. I remember that the 3 TB disk was working and accessible, but I do not know if he made an extensive test. I think, but I am a layman, that the greatest problem may be that the Playon cannot use the full capacity of a large hard disk, e.g. only 2 TB of a 3 TB or 4 TB disk.
Buying a 4TB disk and only be able to use 50% of the capacity would be a waste.

The only test is dumping 4 TB of data to the disk and see if the Playon can access all data.

As to messy: is there a fundamental difference between say four 1 TB folders on your 4 TB hard disk or 4 separate 1 TB drives? In my opinion you will need some structure to categorize your movies.

Did you consider a NAS?

The best and sure shot way to use HDD beyond 2TB's and have them being usable is by partitioning them into partitions no greater than 2TB.

Yep, I recommended this to a user from the Ukraine with a 3Tb disk about a week ago (Partition into 2 x 1.5Th partitions) and he came back and reported that all was working fine.

A comment that I would like to make is that I have seen problems in the past with other players being unable to see all the contents on large drives because the number of media files just outstrips the capabilities of the player so you should keep that in mind.

Found it:
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=18582&hilit=Ukraine