Thread: Can I add a hard drive to VIP222k

How can I add a recorder to this unit? Or is it to much trouble?

the answer (as i have been told by dish) is no.
only the 211 can be made a dvr with an ehd.
if i am wrong, someone please correct me, but i have been asked many times by customers, called dish to verify and the answer i got was 'no!'

You are correct. The 222 and 222K do not have the external HDD (DVR) feature enabled. Dish has promised this for a very long time, but has not said anything of late. Some of us on this board are not optimistic that the 222 and 222K will EVER get that feature enabled or, at least, it won't be the 2 tuner recording/playback experience of the internal HDD ViP boxes as Dish decided to use USB 2.0 instead of eSATA. Even the 922 is USB 2.0 and no eSATA. I think Dish is the only DVR maker not to have an eSATA port as it has much greater bandwidth than USB 2.0. Let's hope Dish at least considers USB 3.0 once it is all set for boxes down the line in future boxes.

Right now, I would settle for the 222/222K to just playback external HDD recordings. That would at least be of some use to us rather than having a useless USB 2.0 port.