Another mad scientist - 522 drive swapping

[satvad]

I got my 160GB drives (Maxtor 4R160L0) today. One is DOA the other is fine.

I put the working drive in my 522, with no idea if there was anything already there or not. It apparently doesn't care about blank drives, it went ahead and did its thing, when done I had a working system, with the following issues:

1. No timers. Apparently those are stored on the hard drive.

2. 100 hours available. Apparently it doesn't care about the actual size of the drive, and creates the data partition as 100 hours regardless.

My next experiment is to use Norton Ghost to clone an existing drive, and try to force the data partition to use the entire extra 40GB.

Note: all timers and recordings were intact when I put the original drive back in place.

At this point I have extended the power and IDE cables outside the case. I used a standard IDE flat cable (the ATA-133 type with twice as many wires in it). For some reason, the IDE cable has to be backward, with the drive 0 connector on the motherboard and the motherboard connector at the drive. I guess they had to do something proprietary to try to confuse people.

What you mean by blank drive. Is it absolutely fresh from manufacturer or did you formatted the drive first with windows or linux operating system? Thanks for all the work you are trying it out. It certainly helps rest of the 522 users. Also when you say no timers mean, I am assuming all the existing timers are gone, but you can create new timers for recording??

 

[Pepper]

What you mean by blank drive. Is it absolutely fresh from manufacturer or did you formatted the drive first with windows or linux operating system? Thanks for all the work you are trying it out. It certainly helps rest of the 522 users. Also when you say no timers mean, I am assuming all the existing timers are gone, but you can create new timers for recording??

I do not know if the drive was "blank" or what was previously on it, sorry, I should have connected to a pc first to see what if anything was there. All I know is I plugged it in and it worked. I am reasonably sure if anything was on there it was not a 522 image.

Yes, the timer functionality was just as with a "normal" unit, just the existing timers and history did not carry over to the new drive.

 

[Pepper]

So could one attach multiple hard drives to this receiver and just flip a switch to choose which drive you want to use?

That's definitely a possibility though my eyesight is not what it once was, I don't think I am going to attempt it. You could also be limited by the power supplied by the unit but that could also be easily bypassed.

 

[Pepper]

Even though it reports 100 hours available, this could be a max hard coded into the program. For example, the free space may be calculated by 100 - the number of hours recorded, rather than measuring the free space available. It would interesting to see if you could actually have more hours on the box when it was full.

An interesting possibility indeed. I will have to investigate this further.

 

[Mark_AR]

Even though it reports 100 hours available, this could be a max hard coded into the program. For example, the free space may be calculated by 100 - the number of hours recorded, rather than measuring the free space available. It would interesting to see if you could actually have more hours on the box when it was full.

I am assuming it is a hard coded number. The End-user is allocated 100 hours, no matter what size the drive.

Since the Hard drive is no-where full at 100 hours, the rest is deemed for OS, Dish-home apps, software updates, two tuner stream buffers, timers, Caller ID & search history, program guide and forced Dish Network DVR events like the 'What's New' DVR event that explained Dish-Pass.

 

[satvad]

I do not know if the drive was "blank" or what was previously on it, sorry, I should have connected to a pc first to see what if anything was there. All I know is I plugged it in and it worked. I am reasonably sure if anything was on there it was not a 522 image.

Yes, the timer functionality was just as with a "normal" unit, just the existing timers and history did not carry over to the new drive.

Is it possible to put the 522 drive in pc and able to access the files? Just I was thinking, if that is possible, then we can swap the drives when one is full, and do backups in a pc or burn on to other media. This option will give more flexibility.

 

[dfergie]

So could one attach multiple hard drives to this receiver and just flip a switch to choose which drive you want to use?

I have one of those Trios hard drive switchs, have thought about trying this with one of my Replays...

 

[Wishbone]

Even though it reports 100 hours available, this could be a max hard coded into the program. For example, the free space may be calculated by 100 - the number of hours recorded, rather than measuring the free space available. It would interesting to see if you could actually have more hours on the box when it was full.

So that could mean that after recording a one hour show (assuming it had "typcal" recording size) that the machine would say that it had 99:15 left. It's possible, due to the hard-coding, that when it says "0 hours left" that it has 140 hours actually on the drive. It is possible that the "100 hours" could be read as "percent free"

I wonder if any of this gets reported back to E*. It's possible that the 522 reports back serial numbers of all equipment installed. An "extraordinary event" such as a blank hard drive being formatted/re-installed might trigger a response back to E* during its nightly report. I wonder if there could be any repercussions to this, if done on a leased unit.

I just went back and re-read your first post. Were you actually able to use the "unsubscribed" 522 (not the drive, the box) and play back recordings?

 

[Shadowtester]

It would be very intersting to set the unit to recording as much as possible as fast as possible to see how many hours could be recorded to see if the additional 40 gigs would be used just not reported as free space.

 

[Pepper]

Wishbone: Indeed, the box, though unsubscribed, will play back anything that happens to be recorded on the currently attached hard drive.

Shadowtester: I am going to put the drive in my pc tonight and see if I can figure out how big the partitions are. If the entire drive is in fact utilized, I will put it in the unsubbed unit and let it record channel 101 for the next few days and see what happens. Imagine, an entire drive filled with Dish 101. Argh!

 

[Pepper]

Here's what happened (160GB)

The results of a 160GB drive in the 522 are less than spectacular. Here's what happened.

With the drive "empty" the unit initialized it to have the first and third partitions approximately the same size as were on the 120GB drive, with the second partition getting all the extra space. The third partition is the one with 100GB in it.

I used ghost to create the partitions the sizes I wanted, partition 1 and 2 approximately the same size as what's on the 120, and partition 3 as approx 140GB. It appears that the unit did not like this, so it proceeded to wipe the drive and repartition it as above. I will do some more experimentation in this area.

This is only a wild guess, but I wonder if the net result of a 522 with bigger hard drive is a 625 with space available in the second partition for whatever "on demand" stuff they decide to download. It would be nice if they keep the existing code base so as to get the bugs worked out faster, and determine whether the VOD feature is enabled based solely on the size of the drive. Would be nicer though if I could figure a way to get it to allow more than 100 hours record space.

 

[David_Levin]

Pepper:

I'm impressed just that it formatted the drive (the 501/8/10 can't do this). Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually you end up with a 625 with a bunch of wasted space containing PPV you'll never watch.

Did ghost identify the format of the partitions?

Mark's release notes for the last 522 update mentioned support for larger hard drives (but not what the space was for).

Sure would be interesting to see if the 921 could do this. It desparately needs the extra space, and an external drive caddy (for easy swapping) wouldn't be out of the question (though certainly not as great as E* actually supporting the expansion bay in this mammoth box).

 

[Pepper]

the partitions are identified as "linux" - I forget the exact details I think ext2.

 

[Smith P.]

Ext3, actually.

 

[Stargazer]

I bet Charlie has a bigger hard drive (or multiple ones) in his receivers at the house (if he even has enough time to watch all that content). As a matter of fact he probably has the 942 and has had it for a while now along with other ones we have not even heard about.

 

[Smith P.]

Another mad poster came to screw the thread .

 

[Pepper]

Well I finally got a couple of swappable enclosures and hooked them up. I shall post some pictures when I get a bit of free time.

Interestingly, the enclosures include a drive activity light. I was expecting it to be blinking like mad all the time, but it seems quite relaxed. Maybe the 522 has a huge buffer and doesn't have to access the drive quite as often as I would have expected?

 

[LER]

remember, the 522 (and 721/921) are Linux based, so it would use memory for disk buffers if it can.

 

[phat_bastard]

Another thing to consider is that the drive has an 8 mb buffer that's a whole lot faster than the disk, and when you're reading / writing large sequential chunks to them you're basically just seeing the activity light blink during the buffer accesses. I'd venture a guess that if you pulled the plug on the unit and made it run fsck on reboot, the disk activity light would be much more animated.

You know, there's another possible variable to the video playback freezing / audio chirps, etc. I wonder if Dish has used different models of disk drives in 522s. There's a world of difference between a 7200 rpm disk with an 8 mb buffer, and a 5400 rpm one with a 2 mb.

 

[SimpleSimon]

One note - it appears that 5400RPM drives (with big caches ) are preferable to 7200RPM ones. I don't know why, but base this on the fact that the Maxtor QuickView is a 5400 unit.