Dear Team , Can the Xiaomi Mi Box 3 read large unpowered external hard drives like 4 tb ? MI BOX usa team tell me that " yes you can use your 8 TB external hard disk for your Mi Box. However flash drive supported formats are exFAT, NTFS and FAT32." but they did not tell me about the external powered or not . Please give me your opinion
The USB port is only able to supply so much power. If the drive can be powered from a single USB port then the storage size shouldn't be an issue. I just depends on how much power the particular drive needs. Give it a try.
works for me (3tb)
The USB 1.x and 2.0 specifications provide a 5 V supply on a single wire to power connected USB devices.
A unit load is defined as 100 mA in USB 2.0, and 150 mA in USB 3.0. A device may draw a maximum of 5 unit loads (500 mA) from a port in USB 2.0; 6 (900 mA) in USB 3.0.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Power
If they followed the standard you'll need a wall adapter. If the data isn't important and you can handle possible corruption, or trust xiaomi don't manage power as per the standard (very likely looking at comments), you can run it direct from the box. Also consider the power losses in the usb cabling too, low quality cables will actually heat up due to their high resistance. The mi box supply is 10W and the unit should usually use 5W or less. It isn't advised to use a PSU at full load.
So for best experience plug it into the wall or a powered hub, if you don't care use the mi box itself. Only way to truly know is to put it under full load and see where the voltage is. It shouldn't change more than 5% from the 5V
It can but what annoys me is that mibox always notifies me that a usb drive is plugged in every fucking time it boots up. It's probably an Android TV thing.
The mibox is for my dad and he's not tech savvy. It's just the motivation I needed to set up a hassle-free samba server with a raspberry pi (the drive only has tv shows and movies on it).
Works for me (4 TB WD My Passport.) NTFS-formatted.