Understanding is one thing, in practice use is another. First, I've not found a way to access the external recordings except from the *one* DVR. Second, the amount of time it takes to manage that amount of recordings.
In the hopper3 thread, I see the same anguish, how could dish have been so stupid as to use a 2 tb drive (single) allowing only 500 hrs of digital recording but yet 16 tuners? As they've said over there .. sure it ends arguments when it comes to which shows (channels) to record, but opens up the battle on storage space.
Dish needs to find a better way to handle drive space, additional drives, and any external storage.
Either way.. still looking for DIRT member to chime in..
Thx!
It may be that once at the 3GB HDD storage point heat increases and so does density, and this increases chances of failure to a minor or major extent. Since Dish has to replace any of their DVR's that have an HDD failure, Dish probably felt the best economical solution was to stay with the "safer" 2TB. And let's keep in mind that unlike some other boxes out there (TiVo's S3 had a far more robust fan at the rear which worked great, and the old DVR recorders also made room for a robust fan even if it did stick out at the rear a bit), the Hopper case/box does a really LOUSY job of cooling. Any of us who have attempted to put one in even an OPEN cabinet have found this out. That fan will go into over noise mode and still won't work properly. I would
not doubt Dish, indeed, tested >2TB internal HDD's and found total failure more because of the lousy cooling of the Hopper case box and it pathetic fan. But, in the past, Dish had so many complaints about fan noise (especially from units in bedrooms) on its legacy DVR's, the company seems to have adopted a "quietest as possible fan noise" mentality and would rather keep the 2TB HDD than pay for more quiet running fans or just have the current fans run at higher speed, but that creates too much noise.
Yes, there are some more expensive 3TB and higher capacity HDD's, but they are more expensive, and Dish may find that after a cost analysis, it was just too expensive to get the more reliable models of HDD for greater than 2TB, and the risks of failure for even a more expensive >2TB HDD, while diminished, still present a greater risk even though not necessarily a big one.
Bottom line: it was the cost. However, I do agree that a 2TB internal HDD is silly for a 16 tuner model that is supposed to serve EVERYONE in the family as being their own DVR. Agreed, if Dish had made it possible for all to access the two external HDD's from anywhere (even on line) that would have gone a long way to having the internal HDD at 2TB being of no big deal.
In addition to the size of the HDD being not optimum, consider the lack of personalization (like Identities or Profiles) to keep each members content separate from each other (although Echostar seems to have--or is requesting a patent for just such a feature) in a 16 tuner DVR seems just as "half-baked" to me. This H3 is supposed to be serving everyone in the family. Managing all that content must be a bit taxing for those with full house.
