Just got my Hopper installed the other day. I am now going to buy a new external hard drive.
So, what's the consensus about the best hard drive for Hopper?
What's the safest choice? Any particular brand recommendations?
I assume the eSATA interface is not enabled yet. Correct?
Should I stay within 2TB? Your comments and recommendations are welcome!
I tried an ESATA connection and Hopper popped up an alert saying that feature is not supported. Maybe some day but for now you need to stick with USB drives.
You need a powered drive. USB-powered drives aren't supported and probably won't work. The "portable" drives are most likely USB-powered and should be avoided.
You can run multiple drives at the same time on Hopper (and the 922) using multiple USB ports on the receiver or via a hub.
If you will be archiving programs you don't want to loose, consider a RAID 1 (mirroring). They aren't supported but mine works fine. RAID 1 doubles the cost of EHD storage but it's insurance against program loss. Take the attitude that a drive WILL fail someday. If you can't afford to loose the information, back it up. You can't do copies with the Dish receiver's interface so RAID 1 or cloning drives on a unix PC would be your only choices.
Green drives will consume less energy at the expense of performance. But in the case of an EHD for your satellite receiver you may not notice any performance issues (slowness to access programs, freezing/dropouts during playback).
Some drives may also spin down without activity. My 922 was OK with this and just took longer to begin playback. But Hopper reports problems accessing the drive if it's in standby and you have to try again.
The "best" brand. I always used Seagate but had some recent failures and switched to Western Digital. WD seems to have the best track record currently.
The WD Elements drive referenced by "Bobby" is a green drive with power management (spin-down). It is self-powered and a reasonable choice price-wise.
