HR2x / HR34 External Hard Drive FYI/Support (eSATA)

[cfb]

Most of the Mybook series wont work with the HR's. If I remember right, many of them try to negotiate the esata link down to 1.5Gb/s and the HR wont do that. Same problem that occurred with some models of the Freeagent.

The mybook is perfect for the wdtv box though. Many of the mybooks will spin down as soon as the usb connection loses power, so when you shut of the wdtv, the drive should shut itself off at the same time.

Sometimes you can crack the unit open, remove the drive and either use it internally or in a different external case like the mx-1. Might be a jumper on the drive you have to remove to stop it from trying to drop the link speed. Some of the drives were flashed with firmware to run at the lower speed, I know that was the case with some of the Freeagents. My guess is those drives didnt pass muster as regular internals at full speed, but worked okay as an external at the lower speed.

 

[perUano]

Guys I have an extra new My DVD Expander 1TB, this is the only unit that has worked for me, I have 2 HR22, no problems at all. Unfortunately they're hard to find, send me a PM if interested.

 

[Firehawk 157]

Guys I have an extra new My DVD Expander 1TB, this is the only unit that has worked for me, I have 2 HR22, no problems at all. Unfortunately they're hard to find, send me a PM if interested.

Think you meant to type "My DVR..."

 

[perUano]

Think you meant to type "My DVR..."

whoopsss!! sorry yes I meant MY DVR EXPANDER

 

[cfb]

I have a DVD Expander. I call it a 'home theater pc'.

 

[Catz]

Just decided to post my experience with adding an external hard drive to my HR-23. When I first subscribed to DirecTV it took me a little over 3 months to fill up the internal drive and I had to start looking for an external solution.

Once drive had less than 20% available free space, it started marking shows to be deleted soon. Look for little yellow warning triangle on the far left side of your playlist. Since 1 terabyte drives are/were quite cheap and I favor Seagate drives over other brands (several bad experiences with IBM and Western Digital) I picked up a bare (drive only) Seagate ST31000528AS. Since this is a SATA drive, I also needed a E-SATA interface. For this requirement I purchased a Thermaltake BlacX ST0005U External Hard Drive SATA Enclosure Docking Station. This includes both SATA and E-SATA interface. Make sure you use the correct interface cable.

Been almost a year now and this drive has about 25% free right now.
Advantage of this setup is that you can power down your receiver and drive. Unplug your drive and set it aside and plug in another drive. Power everything back up and you're good to go again. Just allow receiver to boot up and format your new drive.

Only cavaet is that you have to re-input any series that you were recording since new drive will have no 'to-do' programs to record. So you may want to write down what you wanted recorded in the future.

This has been a trouble free setup for me.

Your experience may vary, and I take no responsibility for your own experiences.

 

[Hamm3r]

HR22 - Seagate Free Agent Pro trouble

I have been using a Free Agent Pro 750 GB w/ my HR20 for about 2 years w/o any issues. I recently had another DVR in another room go bad. It was replaced by DTV w/ an HR22. I had an extra Seagate, same model that I purchased a while back with another eSATA cable but never used them because I didn't want to swap between internal/external drives. The internal drive on that unit was about 60% full.

So now that I had a new unit, I unpackaged the Seagate. To clarify, this is different set of equipment then the HR20 that I already have working w/ the Free Agent Pro. Now I can not get the new HR22 to recognize the (new) seagate. When it boots with the seagate attached, I get video but the Directv remote does not seem to be responsive (channel up/down, menu, list, guide, etc.). As soon as I unplug and reboot, it works fine. I recorded one show on the internal drive just so I could tell if it was bypassing the internal and using the external when attached. I've unplugged the HR22 several times and brought it back online w/ no success.

Anyone have suggestions?

 

[cfb]

Quick answer is I know some models of the directv receiver are incompatible with some models of the FAP, and some FAP's have issues.

A number of the FAP's would try to negotiate the esata link speed downwards, as the drives and interfaces used werent reliable at full speed. The directv box becomes mildly irritated and uncooperative when that happens.

Some users even report removing the drive from the FAP and trying that in another enclosure also without luck, so its something in the drives firmware rather than the enclosure.

Good but expensive advice is to use the FAP as a computer backup drive and buy something thats known to work and be compatible, as noted throughout the thread.

As a last ditch effort, hook the FAP up to a pc and see if it can partition, format and use the drive. It might just be bad. But you're most likely out of warranty at this point.

 

[Hamm3r]

Thanks cfb. I saw My DVR Expander listed as possibility for HR22. What are your recommendations?

 

[Hamm3r]

Nevermind cfb, I see you comments on the previous page.....thanks for the info!

 

[dfergie]

This Can't Be Good...

Noticed my HR20 has been on internal, but haven't had time to check... Found it doing this, this morning on the external...

 

[Ramy]

Noticed my HR20 has been on internal, but haven't had time to check... Found it doing this, this morning on the external...

Never seen that.

 

[dfergie]

Yeah going to let it do that for a little while before checking the drive with a utility (probably lose everything on it anyway)

 

[Jimbo]

Yeah going to let it do that for a little while before checking the drive with a utility (probably lose everything on it anyway)

Let it go Don, see what happens, could be that there were some errors and it WILL fix them.

I have seen this screen, but it was done on purpose, to check what I had going on at the time.

 

[obeythelaw]

I have an HR22/100. Have had it for about 7 months. When I got the receiver I bought a Western Digital 1TB external esata drive and connected it. it has worked fine and never had an issue. this morning when i woke up i turned on my directv receiver and there was a blue screen that said the following: a problem has been detected in the storage device. this may be a simple initialization error or a critical fault. please reboot the box now. that may fix the problem. if that doesn't work then call customer service." It has a diagnostics code on the screen that say 14-948.

i rebooted the receiver but after a few minutes of reboot it came back with that screen. i then removed the external drive and i rebooted the receiver and it rebooted fine except, obviously, i do not have any of my programs on the internal dvr which sucks! so i reconnected the external drive and then rebooted the receiver and it rebooted fine which i thought was good. however, a short while later, i turned off the receiver and then when i went to turn it on again i got the same error message. i removed the external hard drive and rebooted the receiver and all is well. i'm guessing the external drive is the problem. my biggest concern is that i have tv shows that i don't want to lose. is there anything i can do? can i safely assume that it is the external drive causing the problem? i don't have any insurance on the directv box so i don't want to pay for a new box if the box is okay.

also, if i went to buy a new external drive, can i use any esata external drive? i remember when i purchase the western digital box the guy at best buy said that i can't use just any esata drive because there is special software on the external esata drives that are designed to be used as a dvr expander. is this true? i'd like to stay away from the western digital crap so i don't have the same problem again after only 6 months.

 

[cfb]

Sounds like you and dfergie ought to both be investigating getting a new hard drive.

If you'll read back on this thread a bit, you'll see there was plenty of information already presented on which drives will and wont work, and why a 'dvr' model drive may be a better choice.

Since both of you have external drives, it might be possible to copy your programming and series links to another external drive. You'll just need a computer with a pair of esata connections (which can be just two sata to esata cables) or pull apart the external cases and put the drives inside onto regular sata ports. Theres a couple of threads here and on dbstalk that highlight how to make a linux boot cd for the computer and how to copy the contents of one drive to another.

If the drive is too far gone, you might not get it to copy though. I'd put a big fan on both disks and make sure they stay ice cold during the copy process. When my last disk started going south, I couldnt get a copy to happen.

I dont have as many years of experience with the directv hardware as I did the tivo hardware, but it seems to me that while the average drive in a tivo (one or two streams, no hd) would last for 4-5 years, it seems that 2-3 years in an HD dvr with 3-4 HD streams and lots of other stuff happening is when the drives can start screwing up. Doesnt seem specific to the directv hardware either, as I see lots of tivo HD users complaining about drive failures after about 2-2.5 years.

 

[dfergie]

Mine is a Seagate that has worked for fine about 2.5 years this is going to take awhile... its at 44% now... good thing I have Dish also while I see if it survives... I have a WD EHDD that lost all programming with this receiver that has worked fine with my Dish dvr for over a year...

 

[dfergie]

Also pretty much all the shows on this drive I have duplicated, but scattered out on my Dish EHDD's.

 

[cfb]

You're in luck then. When the 2 year old seagate 750gb drive started to crap out, I couldnt copy it. So we had to start it up, watch as many shows as we could until it started stuttering and freezing, turn it off for 10 minutes, and try again. We finally watched almost everything off of it after about a week of that, and I put a 1.5tb WD/AV drive into it. Since then we have a hard time getting it under 85% free...

 

[dfergie]

The only thing I really wanted to keep (25th Anniversary Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) is playing now on HBO, everything else was expendable... if this drive will not work with the HR20 or is flaky I'll try it with my WDTV box...