Are there any TVs that support GPT formatted USB drives?

[peetw]

I just bought a WD Elements 5TB external HDD USB drive. However, my current TV only seems to support MBR formatted USB drives (seems to be pretty common for most TVs), which means I am limited to only 2 TB (the max partition size supported by MBR).

 

I have tried reformatting the USB drive to use MBR and two x 2 TB partitions to get around the limitation, but the TV still doesn't recognise it (it does recognise other smaller USB drives, such as my old WD Passport or Samsung M3, so I'm guessing it doesn't like the multiple partitions).

 

Are there any TVs that support GPT formatted USB drives so that I can use more than 2 TB?

[paddy-stone]

Instead of buying a new TV, you'd be better off getting a media player assuming that's what you're using it for. Then the media player is doing the inter-connecting between the TV and the storage device. The limitations of the TV don't matter then. The media player would be much cheaper than buying a new tv, just make sure it can read GPT partitions and NTFS file systems. GPT is needed for bigger HDDs than 2TB, and NTFS is needed to be able to get around the 4GB file size limits of FAT file systems IIRC.

 

[peetw]

8 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Instead of buying a new TV, you'd be better off getting a media player assuming that's what you're using it for. Then the media player is doing the inter-connecting between the TV and the storage device. The limitations of the TV don't matter then. The media player would be much cheaper than buying a new tv, just make sure it can read GPT partitions and NTFS file systems. GPT is needed for bigger HDDs than 2TB, and NTFS is needed to be able to get around the 4GB file size limits of FAT file systems IIRC.

 

I should probably have mentioned that I'm looking to upgrade my TV anyway  Media player is definitely a good shout, I guess I'm just curious if any TVs do actually support GPT...

[paddy-stone]

23 minutes ago, peetw said:

I should probably have mentioned that I'm looking to upgrade my TV anyway  Media player is definitely a good shout, I guess I'm just curious if any TVs do actually support GPT...

I'm not sure, that could be very hard to find out... I looked at the specs for my TV and it doesn't mention anywhere whether it can read GPT partitions. Actually come to think of it, the media player also doiesn't mention it, so if you're limited to MBR, you may still be limited to 2TB per partition, so maximum of 4x2TB IIRC for MBR. Sorry I forgot about the media player also might have those limitations

I have used NAS or shared drives from my PC for a long ass time now, so forgot about that, I am sorry. But looks as though this limitations would also be on newer TVs too possibly.

 

Might be time to think about using a computer as the media player, then as long as the computer has UEFI/GPT support (which it shoould), then there's no limit to size of drive it's able to read/write. A cheaper op[tion would be to use a raspberry pi with raspbian OS which should have no trouble reading GPT.... but to playback x265/hevc content I believe you'd need pi4.

[peetw]

16 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

I'm not sure, that could be very hard to find out... I looked at the specs for my TV and it doesn't mention anywhere whether it can read GPT partitions

Haha yeah, none of the major manufacturers list it on their spec sheets (as far as I could see anyway), hence why I thought I'd see if anyone had any anecdotal experience of any TVs that do support it.

16 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

Actually come to think of it, the media player also doiesn't mention it, so if you're limited to MBR, you may still be limited to 2TB per partition, so maximum of 4x2TB IIRC for MBR. Sorry I forgot about the media player also might have those limitations

No worries, I had a quick look last night and quite a few of them do at least say they only support MBR, whilst some of them do actually support GPT, which is good to know.