522 Hard Disk Reliability?

[dave_wilson]

I got up this morning to a 522 which is cycling through reboot - signal acquisition - guide acquisition - hard disk diagnostic - crash and reboot. After an hour on the phone to Dish, they are now sending me a new receiver (they waived S&H after I complained about paying on a 6 month old, leased receiver). Is hard disk failure a common problem or have I just been unlucky? I don't relish the prospect of losing the entire contents of my DVR every 6 months due to drive failure.

Dave Wilson

 

[Mark_AR]

The hard drive is the 'weakest link' in any DVR.

Maxtor Quickview CE drives are rated at a return of less than 1%. (That doesn't mean much if you are in the 1%)

Regular drives used to be rated at a useful life of 300,000 hours, but I don't know about the CE drives.

The data sheet follows:

http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/en_us/documentation/data_sheets/quickview_data_sheet.pdf

Bottom line: If its on a DVR, it is NEVER permanent. If you want to archive any programs, you should offload it to tape or burn it to DVD.

My first 522 lasted about 2 months.

 

[mitchflorida]

I am sure that the failure rate is closer to 10% than 1 %.

Mine also failed recently.

 

[Pepper]

It's a basic law of nature that any device with moving parts will eventually wear out. With hard drives, the gamble is that the device is obsolete before it reaches end of life.

 

[dave_wilson]

Problem possibly 2.32 initiated?

Interestingly enough, someone from Echostar tech support called me back today to ask a few more questions about the failure I am seeing. It appears that there have been quite a few similar reports since the 2.32 download so this may have been software-initiated. Even if the hard disk is dead, I would not expect the (software) diagnostics to crash and reboot before providing some kind of report.

I've had hard disks fail on me before and this doesn't seem the same - no perpetually seeking head sounds or nasty bad bearing noises. I will wait Echostar's verdict on the bad receiver, though, since they tell me that they will let me know what they find.

Dave

 

[Mark_AR]

Unfortunately they won't be nice enough to restore all of your lost programming. Although they could probably stream it back into your DVR menu, but I don't think they are on that wavelength yet.

They are still having trouble with a 7 minute 'New Features' stream.

 

[maximum]

If they can't restore your programs they should at lease refund a month or two of the VOD charge since you temporarily lost that service.