I just received the Z20 Pro player from a local distributor. I have an 8TB Seagate 3.5" SATA drive that I want to use it as internal drive for the player. I formatted the drive using ext4 on a Linux computer ( a single partition). According to the player documentation, ext4 filesystem is supported for the internal HDD. Unfortunately the drive is not visible in Media Center. If I delete the partition and insert the drive, is seen by Z20 as an USB drive and I can format it in NTFS, but I understand that NTFS is not very well supported by the player. What can I do? Thank you. Dan
Try EXFAT. There is a bug with NTFS that should be fixed with firmware soon. EXFAT works but you may be limited to wifi file size transfers of less than 18gb or so from computer to Zidoo.
What about ext4? I already copied ~6 TB of media files to the ext4 formatted drive. Is this filesystem supported as written in the product description or not? "This device supports hard disk of the following formats: EXT3, EXT4, NTFS, FAT32, EXFAT". Is this sentence true? More, I have an external 2TB USB SSD drive (Samsung T7) formatted in NTFS, with some media files on it. If I connect it to my Z20 Pro over USB2 or USB3 ports, the player does not see it at all, even a new internal drive can be formatted with NTFS. It looks that this player is very unpredictable regarding supported drives and formats. If I had known this before buying it, I probably would have turned to other cheaper players. I cannot format each media drive just for this player.
I have not tried those other formatting options. I know EXFAT works now with 1.0.52. New firmware is supposed to fix the NTFS issue whenever it becomes available.
What do you mean by " EXFAT works but you may be limited to wifi file size transfers of less than 18gb or so from computer to Zidoo"? Does this apply to the ethernet (cable) connection too? Is this related to a Samba or firmware limitation? EXFAT supports files up to 16EB. Is not acceptable to be limited only to local drives to copy files bigger than 18GB. Network and Wireless connections become almost useless for a player designed to use an internal drive (the only significant advantage of Z20 Pro versus 9x Pro for a 30% higher price).
I'm just relaying what I know. I'm only a messenger here. The file size limitation is a Windows / SMB thing and I'm guessing it would apply to Ethernet as well. EXFAT can hold very large files but it you want to transfer files from a Windows machine via SMB to an EXFAT formatted drive then you will be limited to file sizes of around 18gb or so. The transfer just won't complete. You can transfer files larger than that from the Zidoo to the Windows computer but not from the computer to the Zidoo. It does not affect the file size that the Zidoo can work with. I always use an external drive docking station to transfer large files because it's much faster for me.
Thank you for the info. I'm not using Windows, so I will try to transfer over Samba from Linux to see if the issue is still present.
That is kind of offtopic, but not really... I would strongly suggest not to use EXFAT due to own issues I've experienced. To be fair I was using EXFAT previously only on the Z9X and not the Z9x Pro, but I've suffered from data corruption (which is kind of nice, because there's literally just one[!!!] partitioning tool out there that correctly deals with EXFAT) and disappearing files. Nothing happened anymore since I've moved from EXFAT to NTFS. Additionally the SMB speed went up like 5x and previously I couldn't even start transferring files if they were bigger than 10GB (or... were corrupted, because a data transfer error occured -> no, it is not a network issue, I can assure you). To be fair: These are all experiences I've made on my Z9X, but the statement of the lack of support for EXFAT really really worries me. Try it yourself... you only need to try to clone your partition or shrink / extend it and stuff like that... no way I'm going to use that **** anymore! In theory it's all nice, because journaling isn't really something you should do on an SSD and I didn't want to use NTFS at first (I also don't like NTFS, because EXT4 is really much much better - but that is a different discussion). Additionally I never thought that EXFAT would be the culprit here until I saw that Zidoo itself advises to use NTFS or EXT4 (And regarding the previous point: I'm using Linux, Windows, Android and Zidoo to access the drive - so I decided against EXT4 and for NTFS). Cloned it (same SSD, I was using them in a RAID 1 before) and speed like 5x and the copying / writing to the drive now starts instantly without having to wait like 1min before the operation even starts... This post is already too long, decide for yourself... long story short: use either ext4 or wait for the next firmware (that's what I'm doing currently).
As stated in my previous post, if I format the drive with ext4 is not visible on my Zidoo Z20 Pro. At the end I formatted the drive with exFAT and to transfer the big files from Windows 11 to Zidoo over Samba I'm using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) with mc (Midnight Commander). After more than 6TB of transferred data, including some big ~80GB video files , no issues so far. Even this is not the ideal solution, is anyway acceptable for me.
No it doesn’t; z20 pro has issues with EXT4. On both old firmware (1.0.56) and new 1.0.65(_G). And both internal mounted or via SMB. See my post of last week.
My old drive (but with ext3) was also NOT recognized by Zidoo (any partition). I had to backup files to different drives, reformat to NTFS and restore files just to make the drive visible by Z9x Pro (connected via SATA, not USB).
Wow What a Royal Pain I went throrgh, let me try the options posted here Finger crossed , the reson people doesn't get it becasue it is visible in windows, also docking the drive to zidoo through USB I don't know if any one has tried that becasue that also sound like hit or miss.
