I don't think it's a hardware problem at all. All four are standard USB EHD work on any computer and supposed to work on Dish. They worked good for over a year until locked out by the update on Oct 21st. If it was incompatable drives,buggy drivers,bad controllers or drives they wouldn't have worked for the past year. I gave up one of the inaccessible 2tb drives, reformatted it on my PC and dish H3 saw it right away,reformatted it and it's been working fine for 4 days now. No hardware problem. I don't want to give up the other 3 drives with 6tb of shows. I agree that if dish is such a POS and they never fix this for the many people that have called in after the update I may have to start swapping controllers and drives as a last resort and load it all in the PC as MPEGS as I ride out the end of the contract and cut the cord , can the H3 and go to the cheaper streaming like lots of others.
Well, my drives still work, the ones that work under the Hopper 3. The ones that don't work with the H3 but with the H2K still don't work with the H3 as it doesn't even see the device when it's plugged in and powered on and I am talking about the USB to SATA Adapter cable which works and the USB to SATA Docking Station which doesn't.
Worked good over a year? First of all, that is impossible because unless you had the Hopper 3 before January 28, 2016 which was when it was released, there is no way you could have had the H3 for over a year as it is only October 30, 2016 and the Hopper 3 has been out for a total of 8 months and 2 days. If it worked, it was with a previous DISH Receiver and not the Hopper 3. I don't think a HDD as in the bare drive is incompatible because in all instances as I have tried over a few dozen models of drives, the problem is always the USB to SATA Controller which either allows the Hopper 3 to see it and works or it sees it and doesn't work. The Thermaltake BlacX docking station for example has never worked as initially with the Hopper 3, it would see the drive but it will not show all the recordings and playback will result in a 1221 error but with U331, the Hopper 3 won't even detect it when connected as the Hopper 3 always displays a code 852 notification that says External Device plugged in. With a working USB to SATA Adapter, it will show the code 852 notification. The problem with DISH is that there is no way to see the actual logs to see what the actual problem is and DISH never even after we report the problem ask the users for assistance with tools to troubleshoot the issue and do diagnostics so they know where the problem actually lies. It's almost like saying a car doesn't work but no one actually goes to do a thorough diagnosis of the problem. And until DISH fixes the problem, the drives with whatever it uses between the bare drive to the Hopper 3 will just be nothing more than a door stopper with the data held hostage unless you use one of the workarounds. Even Windows 10 with the November 2015 update had a problem with regedit crashing during a search which was not fixed until the Anniversary update a few months ago but that one is easier because that is only software. It is hardware when you have <insert brand/model controller> and <insert brand/model hard drive> and other different combinations available and just saying something not working or used to work doesn't really help them fix the problem as unless they have 100% of the same identical product we have, they can't just reproduce the issue without requesting information from us which is something they never appear to do. This one still works whether it is with the original drive that fails with the Thermaltake BlacX on the H3 but works with the H2K or any of the cloned drives... Unitek
Y-3322.