Adventures in Terabyting: My Seagate 1.5TB in the HR20 Quest

[jcrandall]

Well, it's been over a week that I've been working on my December project - installing a 1.5TB Seagate drive in each of my HR20s (internally).

First, I've owned my HR20s for over 2 years, and they've been flawless. While the units are leased, I'm comfortable with the install/removal methods, I saved the original drives, and will take the risk if I ever need to send the box back to DirecTV (which will be retured to the exact original configuration first, assuming I'm still alive and all).

Opening the HR20 is outside the guidelines of your user agreement with Directv (nuff said).

I ordered two Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB drives for $119 from newegg as part of a Black Friday promo. Since then the drives have been around $129-$139 - so they are still resonable for anyone considering a massive upgrade.
Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (bare drive) - Internal Hard Drives

For an external esata solution, this drive is available in a Seagate FreeAgent enclosure for $189.
Newegg.com - Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1.5TB 7200 RPM 3.5" USB 2.0 / IEEE 1394a / 1394b Mac Storage Model ST315005FJA105-RK - Mac Hard Drives

Some HR21 users have experienced problems with FreeAgent enclosures (drives are fine, but not in the external factory encloure). Another solution is to use the 1.5TB drive in an Antec enclosure (typically $49), which has been throughly tested by users for HR20 & HR21 - and works good:
Newegg.com - Antec MX-1 USB2.0 & eSATA External Enclosure - External Enclosures

Now that that's over, let me tell you about all the trouble I had setting up these drives.

First - I had to format the drive on the HR20. No good - wouldn't do it.
Attaching the drive to the sata port (internal or external) and powering the receiver generated a "Drive Failure" message. It asked to try a reboot, which would format the drive, only to return to this same blue-screen.
See the attachment for the error screen.

The HR20 WILL NOT format the 1.5TB drive.

So I tried it in the HR21 - and it DID format the drive - with no problem at all. It should be noted the HR21 runs a later version of the base linux OS built into the box (not the firmware) than the HR20. Other testing has shown the HR20 will not work with drive arrays over 2TB, yet the HR21 will (another clue).

After formatting the drive in the HR21, I reattached it to the HR20 - and it worked! It booted, formatted during the "step 1 of 2" phase, and arrived with a blank drive.

 

[jcrandall]

So, next I wanted to try and copy all the data from my previous external 750gb drive. I powered down the 1.5TB drive in the HR20 after requesting a reboot from the menu (called a graceful power down) and pulled the plug when the blue light went out.

I followed the details in this thread very carefully, creating a linux drive managing bootable CD and went through each step carefully:
How To: Copy and Replace Internal Hard Drive - DBSTalk.Com

After about 7 hours, my first drive had finished copying. I started the next one and let it run overnight.

In the morning I installed both drives, and there it was, all my programs, with double the free space. Previously one of my drives had about 30% free, and it they showed almost 70% free. The other had gone from around 10% to around 55%. All of my recordings were there.

I had read that some users had trouble with this method after the drive reached the capacity limit of the original drive (around 50% in my case). I set the HR20s up to do non-stop MPEG4 recording on both tuners using 12 hour recurring manual timers.

The next day, I had one HR20 to about 40% free, meaning I had passed the 750gb point.

I thought this meant success, bucause the other people reporting a problem at the previous capacity point had box lockups, and I didn't.

Unfortunately, I had a different problem. When playing back any recording, the HR20 stuttered and had audio loss, and pixalted video. It appeared the drive couldn't keep up with the requested operations. I tried stopping the recordings, and it was better, but still not right.

This problem affected my new recordings and the stuff I transfered over. Not wanting to spend much more time on it, I rebooted, and when the problem was still there (on both HR20s) I choose to format the drives, and executed "Reset Everything".

 

[jcrandall]

After the format, I again setup double 12 hour manual recordings, and shut the box off, to let it build up some content.

Later that night, I tried some playback and had the same problem. Now I was concerned - it wasn't the data move that caused the problem, it was the drive.

Some investigating online found that others had this problem too, these drives had a firmware problem affecting video streaming and/or raid configs on all operating systems (including linux).
Seagate Releases Firmware Fix for 1.5TB Barracuda Drives - Users reporting lower performance - Softpedia

I called Seagate support and was promised the firmware update would fix my problem, and arrive in my email in 24-48 hours.

It has been 7 days - still no email. Luckily Newegg had the firmware update on their web site, so I downloaded it, confirmed the model numbers (there are two different firmwares out there depending on the exact model number of the drive) and created my DOS bootable floppy to execute this.

http://promotions.newegg.com/files/8h_SD1A.zip

Firmware Download Instructions
Drives with with part number: 9JU138-300, 366 and with firmware revision SD17 and SD15 or SD18. Can be upgraded to the FW fix SD1A.

(Not happy having to pull apart my HR20s again )

I got the firmware installed, replaced the drives back in the HR20s and booted, everything seemed like it was before - INLCUDING THE STUTTERING.

As a last ditch effort, I ran another Reset Everything to format the drives.

 

[jcrandall]

Again I setup a double manual recording MPEG4 for 12 hours, four of the, to keep the box going 24 hours a day.

I tried playback later in the day and IT WORKED!

Not wanting to take it lightly, I gave the box the ultimate workout:
Record two streams MPEG4 HD, playback one (differnet recording), playback on DirecTV2PC, and download VOD -> all at the same time! IT WORKED!


Now the last test - Make sure I can fill a drive and not have any problems. It's been a week that I've been working on that. Check out this picture (attached), 0% free.
My playlist has 338 hours of MPEG4 HD recorded.

Now that is some AWESOME STORAGE!

 

[jcrandall]

It took two weeks, and gave me some major headaches, but I now have two HR20s with 1.5TB drives, running flawlessly.

I'd still have my original recordings as well if it wasn't for a lousy firmware release from Seagate. At least they fixed it and I didn't have to return the drives, which I was all too close to doing last week.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Wow thats a lot of recording space!

Good job!

 

[darrencp22]

Good writeup Jason!

 

[jcrandall]

Done testing them, giving them a fresh format and the new CE for tonight. Tommorrow I'll setup all my timers again and get back to normal recording in stead of 24/7 random HD.

 

[gadgtfreek]

Thats awesome size for sure. I shouldnt need more than the 100 I have now, but its a hell of a plan if someone does.