External Drives Experience (Multi-Terabyte)
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This is merely a review of our experience with multi-terabyte external [USB] drives and the UDP800 MKII, and is not a commentary on any limitations or restrictions that Magentar may, or may not, have regarding the use of external drives.
In short: for those considering the use of external drives, you may have good fortune with drives larger than 16 TB drives shown as being the maximum supported ( https://www.magnetarusa.com/pages/faq ). Side note: Magnetar does not state whether the 16TB support is for the unformatted or formatted capacity of a given drive.
Two different drives are currently used, and are connected to the rear USB jack of the 800MKII (w/proper USB 3.x cable)-- one at a time, naturally.USP800 MKII installed firmware revision: 990
Data on both external drives include MKV files derived from 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD discs and FLAC music files (libFLAC 1.5.0 20250211).
Western Digital MY BOOK
Model: WDBBGB0180HBK-NESN
Unformatted: 18 TB
Formatted capacity: 16.3 TB NTFS
Filled to 16.1 TB----------------------
Seagate Expansion
Model: STKP24000400
Unformatted: 24 TB
Formatted capacity: 21.8 TB exFAT (default Win11 formatting)
Filled to 21.0 TBWith both drives, no issues were observed --
Smooth playback experienced with all options available that were encoded within MKVs (e.g., subtitles, audio formats such as Dolby Atmos, Surround, DTS-HD MA, etc).
All FLAC audio files were properly translated by the 800 MKII & Denon AVR-X3800H with the AVR display confirming that.One note regarding the sound formats for the MKV files:
Root cause unknown but occasionally, an MKV file would have no audio when first started playing. The workaround found to fix the issue, is to press the AUDIO button and choose a "lesser" quality format, let audio play for a few seconds, then switch to the preferred higher quality format (e.g., Dolby Atmos from DD+). Small inconvenience but worth it have the best quality audio available. Will do more testing with smaller-capacity external drives and edit this post if any differences warrant an update.Apart from the intermittent audio issue, entertainment was good-to-go and the rest of the household were happy to not be burdened with walking the unbearable distance to the 800 MKII and inserting a disc.
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