I can confirm that at least each USB port can detect 4 HDD or other devices. So probably 13 x HDD will also work (the limit per individual port may be higher, have one media player that does 6). Running myself with 5 now (=SATA + 4 HDD on the single USB-3 port).
How do you get movies onto the drives that are connected to the X9S? That's what I mean. If I have to constantly disconnect drives, walk them over to the computer and connect them to transfer movies over, it simply isn't the product for me. It's too much of a hassle if I can't write onto the drives over the network.
you can write on them with openwrt transmission or trough samba/ftp, can't write on them under android, There is not write permission at this time,
I am using Samba and FTP on another player (Himedia Q10 Pro) to write to them (FTP reaching Gigabit wire-rate via USB3). For really big updates I move the HDD's physically as both my media player setup and my PC have Plug & Play HDD docking facilities. Android 6 and 7 have a new more complex security setup which needs to be dealt with regarding permissions. Thus far I am not really impressed with OpenWRT despite its high potential. Not fast enough and fairly complex to deploy for non specialists. But obviously no problems with permissions as it is a completely different OS. I am planning to try the good old NAS app from Zidoo next to it. Anybody who tried this already? Also will give Total Commander a go once more as the most recent Beta should have added the required additional security features. What's new in 2.80 beta 4 (September 5, 2016): Unpack RAR files >4GB Support moving files from/to secondary storage on Android 6 and newer Problems with secondary SD-Cards/flash drives, track numbers in media player
unless we get to see some real RTD1295 routers ( probably will never happen on this soc number ), so openwrt start making a repository for this soc, we will be stuck with asking zidoo to ask openwrt to implement/fix things. And that's a slow process....