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aGGY20

Hello. i am looking for the best compatible external hard drive to playback photos and videos on my Bravia Oled TV

Mooly01

No guarantees but this should be a pretty undemanding use of an HDD (I actually use an old USB2 drive that is probably 12 years old now for daily recording) and so any of the normal offerings of portable drives should be fine. I would probably suggest not going for an SSD drive for this usage as I don't know how the Android system copes with 'maintenance' of SSD such as 'Trim' and 'Garbage Collection'.

Which drives to use has been a constant recurring question over the years and Sony even had a list (now long out of date) of supposed compatible drives however there was nothing special about these drives, they were just standard off the shelf products.

Tonycv51

Not sure what does work but I can say don't buy a Samsung bar plus usb stick. With the latest pie update the Tv doesn't recognise the files, though it did on oreo

Tonycv51

One other thing. A usb or ssd may be better if you can find one that's recommended to work as android tv has a habit of starting the disk at random times so a spinning disk could be annoying if you can hear it.

Mooly01

I'll just add that I have tried USB memory sticks as a trial and find that many do not work satisfactorily, particularly when recording and wanting to play back at the same time.

A SanDisk USB flash drive that was OK suffered failure after some months. It ran quite hot and when it failed I tried to see if it was recoverable on a PC, however the the failure showed as being a severe reduction is read/write speeds. Sandisk replaced the drive without question as it had a 5yr warranty but I suspect its usage in this application was not ideal.

Also... many USB3 traditional drives come with really short leads, something that didn't apply to the old USB2 drive I use. That is something to consider.