Having troubles with external HDD.

The USB input is designed to replay USB sticks.  USB HDD drives may not work, particularly USB powered ones which may require more juice than the Qute's USB input can provide.  Either way, you will need any drive to be formatted as FAT32 - most HDD drives need to be reformatted as they are NTFS, which is not always straightforward once you go over 32GB.

Richard, I beg to differ old bean, NTFS is the optimum file system to use for partitions greater than 32GB as it is designed to do this. FAT32 is not optimum above 32GB unless you are using special utilities as it is not straightforward. Normally the default formatter on Windows XP will not support greater than 32GB on FAT32 when setting up and installing. I would not recommend FAT32 for greater than 32GB for interoperability and especially for efficiency and speed.

Edit: This might help

http://www.thundercloud.net/in...venue/ntfs-vs-fat32/

Simon

Simon, yes, agree, FAT32 is not really designed for larger discs, but the fact is that Naim's USB connections on the streamers are designed to read FAT32 - NTFS formatting won't be read.

Richard, I see, so I guess the advice might be attaching a device greater than 32GB to a Naim USB connection is not to be recommended due to the fact the devices need to be formatted as FAT32?

Simon

Simon, according to Phil Harris on this forum, you can have much larger than 32GB, but as always, it must be FAT32 formatted.  Personally I haven't used anything larger than 32GB yet, but a brief search brought up some posts confirming that larger devices formatted to FAT32 work fine.  I did try an experiment with a portable USB drive - initially nothing, but then I realised it was NTFS formatted.  Then I found that later windows OS' don't like to format larger capacity devices to FAT32.  I did discover that you can partition or use 3rd party software to achieve this, but by then I was getting close to giving up the will to live, so...

I'm using a 128GB USB stick on a HDX, works perfect, FAT32 formatted.

So does this also apply for USB sticks plugged into the DAC. Do they need to be formatted FAT32 as well?

USB sticks are formatted FAT32 by default.  The answer to your question, then, would be 'yes'.

Hi Richard yes indeed FAT32 can be formatted larger than 32 GB though it was not  designed for this and so starts to exhibit poor performance with file allocation look up and inefficient overly large cluster sizes and so storage  space will start to disappear, because of this it is not usually recommended. However  I guess with a relatively small number of large wav files this will be less of an issue.

However point to note stpierre76 FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit, and so some long hidef files will not be able to reside on a FAT32 disc, albeit most will do being less than 4GB, or you can knock the resolution down or store as ALAC or FLAC, or split into smaller chunks for your FAT32 disc. I guess this has to be your option if NTFS is not supported.

I've used a 1TB Toshiba portable hard drive connected to the front USB port on my qute. Formatted by my Mac to FAT32, it worked without a hiccup. The drives power requirement is 900mA, given the USB can supposedly charge the latest idevices requiring between 1&2 amps I thought it would be safe to use it. Admittedly I've since swapped over to a Mac connected full time to give me easier access to the library and my favorite feature 'shuffle'.

Hi Stpierre76, just done a few quick sums, the longest file you can store on FAT32 at 192/24 is approx 62  minutes, so you should be fine at 96/24 for whole album files.

My recommendation if you do a lot of deletion and rewrite is to occasionally quick format and re write the data.. That way you are helping the FAT32 file system allocation table which starts to get inefficient above 32 Gbytes. 

Dare I suggest that if you are going to be running high resolution audio that a UPnP server would be a better idea than USB drives - the current drain of a USB drive is quite significant and they are also electrically quite noisy and as such we feel that they can degrade the audio quality of the product quite significantly...

Best Regards

Phil 

Hi Phil,

Does this also apply to USB sticks?

If the drive you're meaning is the WD 500Gb drive that you refer to earlier then that will be a mechanical drive and not an SSD.

The USB port on the UPnP clients is intended for use with solid state devices that tend to have fairly small collections of music on them - large collections on USB hard discs can take a long time to enumerate and - we feel - can adversely affect the performance of the unit itself.

Cheers

Phil

I'm looking forward to the days of £75 500Gb SSD drives...

Using n-Stream will not speed up the indexing of a USB attached drive as that is done by the Uniti or ND product itself - the n-Stream app simply communicates with the Uniti or ND product.

For UPnP servers the only one that I would suggest (other than our own of course) is Asset UPnP - it's the most stable of the lot and even the OSX Beta version seems more solid than the other OSX UPnP servers (AMS and eyeConnect). Windows Media Player can be set up as a UPnP server but to be quite honest it's always seemed to prove itself generally to be as flaky as a flaky thing in this role.

/me waits for all the "minimserver" and "vortexbox" posts to pile in...

Cheers

Phil

Froggy now that you've gotten this far, moving to a true UPnP server should not be difficult for you.  I think that you'll find it more satisfying than a usb storage device for a large music collection.  It sounds like you have the ability to have an ethernet connection from your PC to your Qute, so turning the PC into a real music server by installing Asset on it should be a fun project and give a good result.