Raspberry Pi as media Player?

[WizardStan]

Can anyone confirm that a My Passport type hard-drive will work without a powered hub.

I got my brother a My Passport drive for Christmas and it worked just fine on his laptops USB2.0 port without any additional power required. That's not a guarantee that it'll work, it may be slightly exceeding the 500ma limitation and the laptop just doesn't care, but I think it's not, laptops tend to be pretty strict about USB power limits I've been told.

 

[Ian J]

I'm not sure about that I only have a powered drive on my Pi1 and my Pi2 has a Powered USB hub and Ycable for the HDD.

What file format do you have on the attached drives?

 

[PokeParadox]

Ext4

 

[Ian J]

I feared that, my HD for media is NTFS and it's fine for playing back media but when I try to access it via the network transfer speeds are VERY slow ~400k/s.

When I formatted a USB stick to ext3 to test that out I got ~2MB/s not as fast as my other networked drives but still slow for hard wired connections.

 

[PokeParadox]

I've not tried it but you should just be able to install NTFS support with a quick apt-get