Error formatting usb hard drive

[Amazone]

I have a 37PFL9606h/12, and have bought a brand new western digital extern harddrive 1tb ( http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=640 ).
I have succesfull connected the drive to the tv , and I can explore it.
However to make use of it it needs to be formatted. Formatting goes on but at the end I get an error that formatting cannot be completed due to too low writingspeed. That is an odd problem for a new hard disk!

Does anybody have an idea what is going on or what can fix my problem?

[Philips - Benedickte]

I have a 37PFL9606h/12, and have bought a brand new western digital extern harddrive 1tb ( http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=640 ).
I have succesfull connected the drive to the tv , and I can explore it.
However to make use of it it needs to be formatted. Formatting goes on but at the end I get an error that formatting cannot be completed due to too low writingspeed. That is an odd problem for a new hard disk!

Does anybody have an idea what is going on or what can fix my problem?

Hi Amazone

First of all welcome to the forums.

Please make sure your harddrive got the following requirements:

For recording:
USB 2.0 compatibility Hard Drive
Minimum 250GB hard drive space
Minimum 30MB/s writing speed.

And as you're saying it's due to writing speed, please make sure you're using a USB 2 cable and the settings on the harddrive itself is set to high speed as this can be change on some.

Best regards
Benedickte

[Amazone]

Hello thanks for your reaction Benedickte.

I have been able to solve my problem, but not in the way it should.
I have contacted Western Digital and they had heard of the problem before. They said current tv technology cannot pull the current technolgy of usb3 portable harddisks (even if its usb2 compatible)and is sort of overqualified. He suggested a smaller 500gb disk. He said the hard disks work for pc's but on tv's they are not performing as well.

As far as I understand its mainly a power problem, so I restored and formatted my portable ''My Passport'' hardrive, since the partition had been harmed by the attempt to format it.
Then made my back up on there, so I could free my much older WD digital 1TB ''My Book'' (with extra powersupply) Then I connected and formatted it. This time I got no error and all should be working well (still need to test it)

This shows it has nothing to do with hard disk size or speed, but all with power.
I wish Philips had made a warning for these kind of hard disks, but it could well be they were not up to date when the tv got released. I hope this may change so people can avoid problems like I had.

I am quite dissapointed that Philips did not warn for this so I could have avoided a wrong purchase.

[PierreW]

I have exactly the same issue: first I bought a brand new Iomega ego, 1TB that didn't work because the writing speed was too low I found out that I needed a HD with external power supply. That was my own mistake, I should have read the manual first. Now I bought a WD Essential 2 TB with USB 3.0. Some thing: writing speed too low. That is of course nonsense, but now I have 2 disks that both do not work. Any help?

[Amazone]

Hi, I suppose your WD essential 2TB, is a my book and has extra powersupply. In my opinion (and I am no expert) the problem is either usb3 or the size of your drive. When I called WD they advised me to use a smaller size (500Gb) . But as I posted before My older usb2 1TB My book essential with extra powersupply works fine.

Btw if you are lucky and contact WD (I did it by phone) they might give you advise as well.
My advise is to find out what should work and given de boundaries made in this thread, then swap your harddisk at your dealer... (and do so again if it still doesn't work). It is also possible to build your own external harddisk, with parts from a proper dealer..

[PierreW]

Hi,

Is there not anybody around that can help? I just need the type number of a few hard disks. I bought already two disks that don't work.
Pierre

[Gootje60]

I have a 40PFL8606H, also we have a brand new WDElements 2 TB external hard drive with USB 2.0, the format procedure got well to the end the writingspeed was too low.
Our solution: get all update, we have missed one in september. We have tried three times and then it suddenly worked. Yeah

[Gootje60]

Hoi, a supplement to the above:
The update is not via TV. Via PC we found a new update. We put this one on usb :-)

[PierreW]

I missed the update too. Did the update, connected the disk (WD My Book Essential 2TB) and presto, it works! Thanks for informing me.