You'd be surprised, my external drive is a 2TB drive. I've recently done some pruning of recordings and it is still over 3/4 full.
I seem to recall that you can swap out multiple external drives. True? Any cautions?
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Yes, that is true. Even better, you can have multiple external hard drives (up to a limit of three, I think) all hooked up to the Hopper 3 at the same time. You may need to make sure that the total amount of external storage hooked up at the same time does not exceed 7TB. It will not harm the drives in any way if you exceed that limit, but some of the drives may not show up until you unhook one or more of them, to be under that cap.
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Finally, I will review my settings. Can't even remember which one's I made. Any recommendations or new ones that will come with the Hopper 3?
The most important one I can think of is Menu > Settings > Power > set
Power On to "Tune to Last Channel." This will ensure that the Hopper acts the way that you are currently used to using your ViP612 when you turn it on. The other options for that setting will either Tune to Smart Channel (the Hopper remembers what channels you watched previously, and automatically tunes to what it "thinks" you want to watch) or Show
Home Screen. With "Show Home Screen" selected, the Home screen will also automatically launch with the "Smart" channel in the video window in the upper-right corner. This behavior can be annoying if the Hopper guesses incorrectly about what you want to watch, so it is better just to have it Tune to Last Channel, like all previous Dish receivers have always done.