Your right, when attached to a Linux system one has to do operations on the EHDs with root priviledges. If you tried this, can you post the exact command and the error message response?
External Hard Drive Limitations for Hopper
- Thread starter jwestpfahl
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I'm curious, since the format restrictions of the EHDs is bit atiquated, did you format the entire drive as one big partition? Or did you create 7 or so partitions on the drive? I suspect the the MAC may have been using something other than the MBR partitioning scheme, perhaps GPT. I've found that my hopper won't offer to format drives using GPT.
Very belated update. Have been able to get a 5TB drive connected and functioning properly. Pretty sure that even larger drives will work, possibly up to 8TB. The key I believe is to get a drive enclosure that reports the drive's capacity in 4k sector sizes. When reporting 4K sectors, the total numbers of sectors remains below 2^32 which does not overflow fields in the MBR partitioning scheme. Here is the drive enclosure I purchased on Amazon that works well.
Isn't the block size a function of the drive and it's formatting rather than the electronics in the enclosure? It seems counterproductive for the enclosure to remap blocks. The partitioning information which resides on the drive still needs to fit and if MBR is limited to 32 bits of block information then it would seem the drive formatting would need to accommodate this.
Regardless, there's reportedly a 1000 program limit in the Dish disk system so even if you have a huge drive it may not be all usable.
The chip involved may or may not support the 4k sectors, may or may not support LBA48 addressing, and many other features.
The whole physical sector size v/s logical sector size issue gets really complicated.
Early on, the driver with 4K physical sectors reported 512 byte logical sectors and all was good. But there was a 2.2TB limit for MBR partitions.
GPT gets around that but adds other issues.
Using 4k logical sectors allows for 16TB with MBR partitions, but causes incompatibilities with stuff that assumes the long time standard of 512 byte sectors.
Thus, older bridge chips (and enclosures using them) can be problematic.
That is an interesting fact. User have reported that older receivers had this limit. I wonder if this might have changed with the newer receivers. I'm currently at ~850 movies, using about 3.5TBs. Might try to transfer a couple hundred TV shows over. Will report back my findings.
How are your 3 drives connected? Each to different USB port? Or using a USB hub? I've tried a drive on each USB port. The front port is only USB 2.0 and it didn't recognized a drive was attached.
With everything connected, its not possibly for me to examine the back of the Hopper 3 chassis easily. All the specs I've seen claim both rear pots are supposed to USB 3.0. How did you make the determination that rear USB ports are different?
I tried to connect 3 drives in the same manner as you. This time, the USB 2.0 port in the front is reporting a drive and it seems to working. I plugged my large drive into the rear bottom port. I then connected a new drive to the rear top port. The confirmation box was presented to format the drive. However, after the format appeared to complete. No additional "source" choice has become available. So not sure what this means. For my clarification, you have all 3 connected at the same time and all 3 plus the hopper drive appears on "sources" list?
Yes all 3 show up but I got small drives 500 gig a piece, But I took one off to install a ota module If any of yours are over 2TB they may or may not show up...
All my EHDs are 2.0. I have 1 connected to each USB port. Every once in a while when I go to DVR sources I cannot access all programs on all EHDs. After multiple reboots I can usually get them all back. Does anyone else have this problem?
Outstanding. It also explains why the speed I observed with a USB 3.0 drive attached to the top rear port was so slowThe bottom one is the Hopper 3....
