Hello Gordon,
I recently purchased a Lumin T2 network music player, but am confused as to how to connect it so that I get the most benefit from it in my system.
The T2 has Ethernet and USB ports on the back. Here are my questions about using the USB port:
- Can I connect a USB drive with more than 2TB capacity to the USB port?
- Can I connect more than one drive?
- Can I use a dual-drive system like a Western Digital WD My Book Duo or WD My Cloud Duo?
- Can I use an Orico dual-drive SATA-to-USB docking station?
Here are my questions about using the Ethernet port:
- Can the T2 only be connected to the Internet by cable?
- Can I send music to the T2 from a cloud service like Google Drive or WD My Cloud?
Your assistance on these questions will be much appreciated.
Best regards,
Arnon
Israel
Hello Arnon,
Some of your questions were beyond my expertise, but Angus Leung, Lumin’s Global Sales and Marketing Manager, has graciously provided information that you should find helpful, which I have paraphrased in the answers below:
- You can definitely connect a USB drive with capacity greater than 2TB. The T2 supports FAT32-formatted drives, as well as NTFS, and following a firmware update released in 2019, exFAT as well. FAT32 has a maximum volume size of 2TB. With NTFS, it’s 256TB. Developed by Microsoft, and the default file system for Windows, NTFS has a maximum volume size of 256TB. With exFAT, the maximum recommended volume size is 512TB, and it’s supported by macOS as well as Windows.
- You can only connect one USB drive to the T2.
- You can connect a dual-drive system like Western Digital’s WD My Book Duo to the T2’s USB port, as long as it’s configured as a RAID (redundant array of independent disks) drive (the default setting), so that it appears to the T2 as a single logical drive. But the My Book Duo will not work with the T2 if you use the option to configure it as two independent drives.
The WD My Cloud Duo is a NAS (network attached storage) drive. Its USB port is intended only for loading content onto the drive from external devices like thumb drives. You can’t connect it to the Lumin T2 via USB -- but see my remark on NAS drives in reply to your fifth question. - Because the T2 allows only one drive to be connected via USB, you cannot use a dual-drive SATA-to-USB enclosure like the Orico unit you reference, nor can you use an SATA-to-USB enclosure that has both a drive bay and memory-card reader. But you can use a single-bay SATA-to-USB drive enclosure with the T2.
- The purpose of the T2’s Ethernet port is to connect it to your network router, or to a network access point. The router must be connected to the Internet to use music-streaming services like Tidal and Qobuz. If you have a NAS drive on your network, you can play music stored on that drive through the T2 using its UPnP rendering capability, but the NAS must be running a UPnP server application for this to work.
- You cannot stream music files to the T2 from cloud storage services like Google Drive and WD My Cloud.
In the lead sentence to my review of the Lumin T2, I posed the rhetorical question, "Do you have to be a propeller-head to enjoy Simplifi’d hi-fi?" I don’t think you do, but as your excellent questions about the T2 illustrate, it sure helps!
Thanks for writing.
Best regards,
Gordon Brockhouse
