USB External Drive Sharing with Huawei HG659

[Lasa]

I just purchased a 4TB Seagate External Desktop Drive to connect to my HG659 modem to use as a NAS drive. Before buying the 4TM drive, I tested the process with a 2GB fkash drive it worked fine.

When I connected the 4TB drive I realised that the modem doesn't detect the drive. The drive keep on running and operation indicator (light) continue to be on. When I connect the drive directly to my computer it works fine.

The drive is formatted to NTFS. I saw in the manual that HG659 is compatible with NTFS. But there was no limit of drive size.

Can you please help with fixing this problem?

[david64]

Hi @Lasa . While the HG659 supports NTFS, the manual doesn't mention a size limit; it might be only 3TB.

The 2 USB ports might only be USB2. Does your 4TB drive use USB2 or USB3?

There is also this warning in the manual:

If you connect a USB device to the HG659, verify that the input voltage and current of the
USB device does not exceed 5 V/0.65 A. Otherwise, the HG659 may malfunction.

[Lasa]

@david64 thank you for responding. 

My external drive is a Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive 4TB. It is compatibe with USB2. As this is a desktop drive, it has to be plugged into power and doesn't use USB to power the unit. So I thought 5V/0.65A condition is not applicable to my situation. Is my understanding incorrect?

[david64]

Hi @Lasa . You are correct regarding the power supply.

Read this thread. One user has 3TB drive not working, another has 2TB which is working.

https://community.tpg.com.au/t5/Broadband-Internet/USB-Drive-Sharing-with-Huawei-HG659-Solved/m-p/88...

Last resort is factory reset but you may have to do the internet configuration again.

[Lasa]

I just rang TPG to find out more infromation about the problem. The technician said the modem is only for accessing internet. They cannot offer any support on unsing the USB port. I found that funny. So I thought I might mention it

[orbistat]

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@david64 wrote:

One user has 3TB drive not working, another has 2TB which is working.

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Hi @Lasa as @david64 has suggested I also beleive this to be the case, probably a 2TB limit. If you have a PC available you could maybe try creating say a 1.9TB primary partition and format the remaining space as another primary partition and see what the HG659 sees then.

I have a spare HG659 but I don't have an external drive over 2TB to test this myself.

[Lasa]

I have partitioned the external drive to be less than 2TB per partition. Then changed the partition table to MBR by reducing the usable space of drive to 2TB. Every time Imade a change, I rebooted the modem. Nothing worked so far. I decided to give up after spending most of my Saturday on this. 

[orbistat]

Hi @Lasa It's possible that the windows disc manager isn't seeing any hidden partitions, windows will only display partitions that it can use, some brands of backup devices have disc and firmware recovery tools and power managment code that resides on additional sometimes proprietory partitions.

A partioning tool such as Linux based parted magic will be able to see the whole story but you'll need to boot the PC from a bootable USB drive first and run the app from there.

In addition there's also a chance that the disc controller chip used is too new for the HG659 to recognise as it's not on it's Hardware Compatibilty List in it's own firmware.

[Lasa]

@orbistat Can you think of anything for me to try out?