External Hard Drive

Fox McCloud

SatelliteGuys Family
Original poster
Apr 21, 2008
48
0
It's unlikely I'll be using one of these any time soon (if ever), but my questions are;

-can you hook up at external HDD with more than 750GB capacity, or will it only recognize 750B?
-once the internal HDD is full, will it start saving to the external HDD?
-In the DVR menu, will all shows be listed, or will I have to go into a separate one for the external HDD?
-Can I play directly from the external HDD, or do I have to transfer it to the internal one first?
 
It's unlikely I'll be using one of these any time soon (if ever), but my questions are;

-can you hook up at external HDD with more than 750GB capacity, or will it only recognize 750B?
-once the internal HDD is full, will it start saving to the external HDD?
-In the DVR menu, will all shows be listed, or will I have to go into a separate one for the external HDD?
-Can I play directly from the external HDD, or do I have to transfer it to the internal one first?

1. Yes, some larger drives have been recognized. No, if it doesn't recognize the drive you get nothing, not 750GB.
2. No, it does not cascade to the ehd. You must manually move programs to and from the ehd. Programs on the internal will start deleting if that drive becomes full.
3. No, you must list the ehd contents by a separate menu. This is an archive drive, not an extension of the internal drive.
4. YES! You can play directly from the ehd. Even if you are recording other programs on the internal drive.
 
For a few clarifications...

you're saying I can use a external larger tan 750GB, but only 750GB will be recognized by the player itself?

I'm glad you can play it directly from the drive....it'd be annoying if you constantly had to move them around.

Also, do you know if Dish will ever enable to feature for an external to act as an extension of your internal drive, in the future (cascading, shows on both lumped together, etc)?
 
No. If it recognizes a HDD over 750, you'll get the whole thing. Or nothing.

Possible. There may be other higher priorities on the list first.
 
Do you know how a Dish HDD is formatted? If it's with NTFS, then the max size supported would be 2TB internal and 2TB external (of course, if they get bigger than this, they could just make multiple partitions, and tell the software to just pool the data on all of them together).

Speaking of which, is it possible to upgrade the internal HDD on your DVR? If so, is it even legal?
 
Do you know how a Dish HDD is formatted? If it's with NTFS, then the max size supported would be 2TB internal and 2TB external (of course, if they get bigger than this, they could just make multiple partitions, and tell the software to just pool the data on all of them together).

The HDD file system is Linux based.

NightRyder
 
Do you know how a Dish HDD is formatted? If it's with NTFS, then the max size supported would be 2TB internal and 2TB external (of course, if they get bigger than this, they could just make multiple partitions, and tell the software to just pool the data on all of them together).

Speaking of which, is it possible to upgrade the internal HDD on your DVR? If so, is it even legal?
You are thinking in terms of Windows XP Home Edition. NTFS is actually limited to a maximum number of clusters, not bytes. So, using 64-KB clusters, the maximum NTFS volume size is 256 terabytes minus 64 KB. Using the default cluster size of 4 KB, the maximum NTFS volume size is 16 terabytes minus 4 KB.
 
For a few clarifications...

you're saying I can use a external larger tan 750GB, but only 750GB will be recognized by the player itself?

I'm glad you can play it directly from the drive....it'd be annoying if you constantly had to move them around.

Also, do you know if Dish will ever enable to feature for an external to act as an extension of your internal drive, in the future (cascading, shows on both lumped together, etc)?

During the last Tech Forum they did say that they do have an update that will list recordings on the extension (HDD) that will show in the My Recordings DVR list along with the recordings on the unit's HDD. Now, when will they send that software update? Who knows. And, for what it is worth, they are supposed to turn the 211 and 222 in full DVR capable boxes, using external HDD's of course.
 
During the last Tech Forum they did say that they do have an update that will list recordings on the extension (HDD) that will show in the My Recordings DVR list along with the recordings on the unit's HDD. Now, when will they send that software update? Who knows. And, for what it is worth, they are supposed to turn the 211 and 222 in full DVR capable boxes, using external HDD's of course.


Let me guess; they'll still charge the DVR fee though?
 
Also, do you know if Dish will ever enable to feature for an external to act as an extension of your internal drive, in the future (cascading, shows on both lumped together, etc)?

My guess would be never. In spite of theoretical USB speeds the external hdd only support 1 stream at a time. The 622/722 could be recording up to 3 and playing back 2.

There's just no way the external drive could take over for the internal. Best they could do is perform a background automatic transfer of the oldest programs when it sees the hard drive is getting too full.

There hasn't been any mention of a feature like this.
 
My guess would be never. In spite of theoretical USB speeds the external hdd only support 1 stream at a time.

That's a software limitation, not a hard disk limitation. The drives I use are designed specifically for dvr and video applications and can support up to 10 concurrent streams.
 
That's a software limitation, not a hard disk limitation. The drives I use are designed specifically for dvr and video applications and can support up to 10 concurrent streams.

The drive might be, but I don't think USB2 can do those speeds (just look how slow the transfers are now). Have you ever seen a USB drive support multiple video streams? I suppose I could try in on my Media PC.

If E* had included an eSATA port we'd be cooking.
 
(just look how slow the transfers are now). Have you ever seen a USB drive support multiple video streams?

If E* had included an eSATA port we'd be cooking.
Once again, that's a Dish software limitation. They have chosen to move data at the slower "normal" speed of the USB 2.0 specification and not the "high" speed. I move data by USB 2.0 all the time and it's a lot faster than my 622.
 
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