hi we have got this tv and we have tried to put our collection of movies on a wd 4t external hard drive but every time we connect the drive to the tv is says device not connected , we know the drive is working fine as it works on the computer , but if we connect a 300mb drive to the tv it works with out any problem , does anyone know if there is a limit to the size of external drive that these tvs will take thanks

What file format is the hard drive formatted as?

thank you for reply we have tried to format the 4tb drive at fat and it is on ntsc still dont work but the 300mb drive is on ntsc and works fine

NTSC is a broadcast video format, I suspect you mean NTFS

Anyway. I had a look in the online manual and came across this


So that may explain why your drive doesn't work. In fact as far as I can see there is no mention at all that the TV supports any type of hard drive, only flash memory devices and even then only devices formatted using FAT16, FAT32 or exFAT.

Link to manual

http://www.panasonic.co.uk/html/en_G...trackInfo=true

Page 89

Thank you for your reply but why does a 300mb external drive work , I have seen around the net that Panasonic have tested buffalo 160 gb to 3 tb hard drives on there tv so I am thinking that the tv won't support the size of drive , this is why I am asking about if anyone knows for sure what size these TVs will take when putting a external hard drive thanks

hi we spoke to panasonic today by phone and they have said that this tv will only work with a external hard drive upto 3tb thanks for your help

When Pana refer to the buffalo drive they are referring to recording on it from the TV tuner .

Would it not be better to either put the content on a SD card and insert that in the TV

Or better still stream the content from your PC via your home network .

Got distracted earlier. Looking on the Panasonic website and reading a few random manuals it would appear that they only support hard drives for recording, not playing media files you have copied from a PC.

When you plug in a hard drive and have it recognised by the TV it gets formatted using a file system Windows can't read. So even if you did hook it back up to your PC you would not be able to copy anything over to it.

All the manuals I have read only mention playing back video files from flash drives. Also the manual I linked to for the TV model mentioned in the OP makes no mention at all of a hard drive. Nor any mention of being able to record TV programmes onto one which is mainly what they seem to be used for. So I'm not entirely sure why Panasonic are saying it can be used with a hard drive. Unless they were just talking generally about support for hard drives across the range and not that particular model specifically.

thank you for your reply if i could put on over 2,000 movies onto a sd card i would , i dont like to stream over network because of the connection speed is only 4Mbps, when i phoned up panasonic i gave them the model number to the tv and they said that the tvs have been tested with a few models of external hard drives rangeing from 160gb to 3 tb , if i connect the 300gb drive to the tv and your advice is that it gets formatted so windows cannot read the drive , then how can it be doing what it is not suppose to be doing , the models of hard drive they said buffalo and western digital and variious other models of external hard drive will work with this tv
Last edited by muffin1962 : 12-06-2013 at 14:02

4gz? Do you mean 4Gbps which would be extraordinariy quick for a local network? If you mean 4Mbps then that is plenty for SD if marginal for HD but that speed is a bit on the low side for a typical home network set up.

thanks for your reply lol sorry did not realize i put wrong speed on my post

Ok. So why is the speed only 4Mbps?

thankyou for your reply i am not on fibre optic i done a speed test and the results are
download 3.04 mbs upload 1.04mbs
is anyone aloud to post pictures on this site thanks

But that is the speed between you and the outside world on the internet. The speeds between devices on you own local network will be much, much faster and are what count for streaming from your external hard disk to the TV.

I have no idea why you were told what you were told. It flatly contradicts what is in the manual. Neither the manual for your TV nor the Panasonic USB compatibility list make any mention of using hard drives.

I suppose it is feasible there has been a firmware update to allow reading of hard drives that has somehow not made it into the documentation online.

And of course it is not unknown for customer service people for a manufacturer to know sweet FA about the products they are advising on!

hi thank you for your replys what i have done was to order another 3tb hard drive which came today , reformatted to fat32
so i ended up with 2.72 tb left on drive with GUI version of fat32format. , put some movies on the drive and tested ok works 100%