622 external harddrive question

[Giantsfan]

I was considering picking up a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent on sale this week for use when Dish implements external recording this summer (hopefully ). Anyone have an opinion if any external would be compatable, or do you think Dish will limit compatability to certain brands/models? Thanks!

[KAB]

From some of the Team Summit reports, it would be premature at this point.

[8bitbytes]

It sounds like they will limit drive size to 750gb from what I have read here but you should also go check failure rates for these super cheap drives. Part of the hesitation of Dish to make this happen SUPPOSEDLY is because most consumer drives are not designed to spin 24/7 and will fail and then people will call in screaming about how to retrieve all their saved shows that are now lost.

Can you imagine how hard it must be to try to hire someone to be a Dish CSR? Even overseas, nobody wants to listen to screaming ignorant Americans.

Buy a server/video workstation grade hard disk at a minimum. An external storage device with two drives in a RAID 1 configuration might be even better.

[ekilgus]

Part of the hesitation of Dish to make this happen SUPPOSEDLY is because most consumer drives are not designed to spin 24/7 and will fail and then people will call in screaming about how to retrieve all their saved shows that are now lost.

Really? What cheap hard drives are you talking about? You can buy a decent Seagate or other similar drive with a MTBF in the tens of thousands of hours pretty cheap. Are these what you consider "consumer drives"? What drives would you consider "commercial" drives?I've been using these hard drives for many years running them 24/7 5-6 days a week with excellent results.

As far as a possible 750g limitation, no problem since I'll use multiple hard drives.

[8bitbytes]

Part of the hesitation of Dish to make this happen SUPPOSEDLY is because most consumer drives are not designed to spin 24/7 and will fail and then people will call in screaming about how to retrieve all their saved shows that are now lost.

Really? What cheap hard drives are you talking about? You can buy a decent Seagate or other similar drive with a MTBF in the tens of thousands of hours pretty cheap. Are these what you consider "consumer drives"? What drives would you consider "commercial" drives?I've been using these hard drives for many years running them 24/7 5-6 days a week with excellent results.

As far as a possible 750g limitation, no problem since I'll use multiple hard drives.

Enterprise Class HDs from Seagate and WD cost only 10 to 20% more and have MTBF ratings of 1 million or more hours, have error correction and data preservation programming, run cooler but are able to tolerate higher constant temperatures, quieter, and have power management built into them.

However, MTBF is for a good drive that runs reliably in a good environment. Many of these cheap desktop drives CAN run reliably but the failure rate during the first month is much higher on them than on Enterprise Class drives. How many hours of HD will you have on your drive in the first month, only to have the drive go dead on you?

You said 5 or 6 days a week. You can extend the life of almost anything by giving that little bit of down time. WD drives have their SE and RE class drives and Seagate has their ES class. Even in these categories, the bid to get the jumbo drives out fast has made them not as reliable even though they are rated as 24/7 drives. The 500gb drives fail twice as often as the 320gb, and the 750gb are failing even more than that.

You won't get a bad one, but believe me - everybody that does get a bad drive will be fuming.

[Sammy033]

Why would an external drive need to run 24/7? Is the idea that shows that would normally be recorded to the internal drive would instead go to the other one, and the drive must be available at all times? Or, if its just used to transfer/store already recorded material, or watch something from it, shouldnt it only be on when needed? Like.... an external USB drive?

[Smith, P.]

Can we merge the thread to this http://www.satelliteguys.us/dish-forum/76574-where-usb-external-storage-942-vip622.html ?

[navychop]

No need to buy now. They're only getting cheaper.

I vote to NOT merge. The train of thought here would be hard to follow once merged into the other thread. Better to close this one, if need be.

[8bitbytes]

Why would an external drive need to run 24/7? Is the idea that shows that would normally be recorded to the internal drive would instead go to the other one, and the drive must be available at all times? Or, if its just used to transfer/store already recorded material, or watch something from it, shouldnt it only be on when needed? Like.... an external USB drive?

Very good question and one that wasn't answered by the statements made about what was said at the summit that was then passed on to us. What I read was that the Dish folks were concerned that the drives used by customers might be a problem because they aren't designed to run 24/7. Now, I would say from that comment that they figure we are going to plug another drive in and leave it plugged in. This may very well be true for many who use this feature.

If you are going to unplug your drive after every recording, you may not be in that group.

Maybe they don't intend for us to use drive after drive after drive. That was not revealed in the conversation we were given in this forum. I think it is high time Dish gave us a heads up on what their idea is and how they envision it working before they make a new function less useable than we thought.

[ekilgus]

Let me clarify a couple of things. Yep, I've gotten some bad hard drives but they usually are DOA or shortly thereafter. Other clues may be bearing noise. In any event, Once I've determined the drive is working OK, it almost always outlasts the data stored on it. The running of these drives 24/7 are because they're in servers.

I don't expect to run the hard drives 24/7 when they're being used for Dish external storage. I would record movies I want to keep to the 622's hard drive then transfer them to external storage for archive. I see no reason to keep external storage running unless you will be storing or viewing some content.

Finally, even though the drives are remarkably reliable, I always backup using Disk mirroring or an auto backup program.