I ran the check status and it reported the hard drive health as good, but I still am having issues. This past Friday I had issues with the HWS while trying to watch recorded content from the DVR. It also seems to happen when transferring files to the external hard drive. Turning on the Wireless Joey in the master bedroom seems normal if watching live TV, when attempting to watch DVR content it will sometimes freeze, then go to black screen. The guide and all menus are still available and the WJ shows as linked on the receiver status screen, just no content video. In order to get back to watching anything I have to unplug the HWS in the living room downstairs, and sometimes unplug the WJ (sometimes it will relink on its own, sometimes not). This has been happening multiple times a week and Friday it took me 45 minutes to get everything back in working order.
The wife is NOT happy and ready to scrap DishNetwork. Her reasoning is "I never had these issues with WOW Cable", I am more patient (and technically inclined) and have a large library on external hard drives that I would like to continue to use. It has worked ok for the last two days, although recorded content did freeze up yesterday. All I had to do was go back to live TV and then back to DVR to resume watching the show we were watching. No idea why it froze and I had to go back to the menu. The DVR doesn't seem to like when I quickly hit the skip button multiple times to skip commercials (usually 7 times, 3.5 minutes, works to get through all the commercials so I will quickly hit skip 7 times to get back to the show), that seems to be what triggered the freezup yesterday. I NEVER had any issues with my VIP722, had the same receiver for 10 years with no problems, same can't be said of my Hopper experience.
I am hesitant to call Tech support due to the fact I will be asked to restart everything all over again by unplugging, and it may work fine for a day or a week and then I will have to call them all over again, and spend another hour or so on the phone only to get the same results. It is frustrating.