HR2x / HR34 External Hard Drive FYI/Support (eSATA)

[tonyvm]

How do I reboot my hr21 to add a new hard drive

 

[Ramy]

How do I reboot my hr21 to add a new hard drive

Open the panel on the right hand side and push the red button.

 

[cfb]

That works, but I'd recommend going into the system setup menu and telling it there to restart the receiver. When the power light goes out and then comes back on, pull the plug. Then attach your external drive, turn it on, and then plug the receiver back in.

The red button reset doesnt guarantee that stuff in ram is committed to the hard drive, but the restart receiver will cause any data sets and show information to be written and enough time left for the drive to write its buffer. Sort of like yanking the plug on a desktop windows machine without shutting it down first.

Theres a good chance that nothing bad will happen with an RBR or at least nothing bad that wont be cleaned up after the restart, but its best to do a more graceful shutdown.

 

[syssjr]

I had the same thing happened to me Yesterday. Have had an external drive hooked up for over a year on a HR21-200. There may have been a power failure yesterday morning, but none of my other DVR's, PC's were effected. Turned on the set, and it was scanning the drive. Went through 100% and said it 'passed'. Then came up with a screen with Diag code 75-496. Tried it
twice, same result. Called customer service, they said drive must be no good.
Ok.. then why did it pass the test ??!!?? PC does recognize drive. Tempted to
attach it to another HR21, but If drive is actually good, it will wipe the existing
programming off of it. Any one know any other way of 'fixing' this ?

-Steve

I have an HR22/100. Have had it for about 7 months. When I got the receiver I bought a Western Digital 1TB external esata drive and connected it. it has worked fine and never had an issue. this morning when i woke up i turned on my directv receiver and there was a blue screen that said the following: a problem has been detected in the storage device. this may be a simple initialization error or a critical fault. please reboot the box now. that may fix the problem. if that doesn't work then call customer service." It has a diagnostics code on the screen that say 14-948.

i rebooted the receiver but after a few minutes of reboot it came back with that screen. i then removed the external drive and i rebooted the receiver and it rebooted fine except, obviously, i do not have any of my programs on the internal dvr which sucks! so i reconnected the external drive and then rebooted the receiver and it rebooted fine which i thought was good. however, a short while later, i turned off the receiver and then when i went to turn it on again i got the same error message. i removed the external hard drive and rebooted the receiver and all is well. i'm guessing the external drive is the problem. my biggest concern is that i have tv shows that i don't want to lose. is there anything i can do? can i safely assume that it is the external drive causing the problem? i don't have any insurance on the directv box so i don't want to pay for a new box if the box is okay.

also, if i went to buy a new external drive, can i use any esata external drive? i remember when i purchase the western digital box the guy at best buy said that i can't use just any esata drive because there is special software on the external esata drives that are designed to be used as a dvr expander. is this true? i'd like to stay away from the western digital crap so i don't have the same problem again after only 6 months.

 

[videojanitor]

Here's a simple question that I can't seem to locate an answer for: I know if I plug an eSATA drive into my HR20 that it will disable the internal, but will the internal drive continue to spin? My main reason for connecting another drive is to cut down on the noise -- but if the internal keeps spinning, that's going to defeat the purpose.

 

[cfb]

Yep, the internal will keep spinning, keep wearing, and generate heat.

 

[videojanitor]

Hmmm, well that's annoying. Thanks for the info -- you just saved me some time, money, and aggravation.

 

[videojanitor]

OK, I broke down and decided to drop a Western Digital WD10EDVS drive into my HR20. The process was smooth and the drive is VERY quiet compared to what was in there. I have however experienced some audio dropouts/video stuttering, especially if rewinding into the buffer. In doing some reading, it seems like I *may* need to put a jumper on the drive to limit the transfer speed ... can anyone tell me if indeed this is true?

 

[cfb]

I've heard occasional rumors about people having problems with external drives that wouldnt properly negotiate the sata transfer rate, and setting those drives to drop the sata transfer rate to 1.5 helped with those problems, but I always suspected that there were other issues that the jumpering just bandaided, or the process of taking the external apart and putting it back together again resolved those.

WD has a lot of different drive models, but I think I have the 1.5GB version of that drive in my HR20 upstairs. I've had a handful of drives both internal in the HR20's and external in Cavalry and Antec MX1 cases. Never put a jumper on any of them.

Is it IN the HR20 or in an external case?

 

[videojanitor]

Is it IN the HR20 or in an external case?

It is INSIDE. I didn't want to go the external route as my main concern was getting rid of noise. When I found out that the internal still spins when an external is connected, I ruled that out. For the most part it is fine -- I just get the stuttering/audio dropout on occasion.

 

[cfb]

I figured. Thats where mine are. Little bit of a hassle to get the old one out and the new one in, but I really didnt need/want the extra box and more things that could go wrong.

Is this a new drive? Was it ever in use elsewhere?

Try running the diagnostics on it. Reboot the receiver and when you get the 'running self test' hit the select button on the remote. Box should enter diagnostic mode. Get into the disk tests and run the short test. If that works, try the long test. It might take a few hours.

If it passes both of those tests, you might have a bad or loose sata cable, or the disk might be experiencing an excess number of bad sector read problems. The only time I had stuttering/audio drops was with a seagate drive that failed the short smart test and subsequently dropped dead. I had an external cavalry unit that started doing the same thing after working fine for many months. It'd work fine on a PC via esata but was glitchy on the HR20. Never did figure out what the culprit was, I ended up taking the drive out of the cavalry and putting it inside the HR where it worked fine, and used the cavalry case with another drive in it for pc backups, where it also continues to work fine.

 

[videojanitor]

Is this a new drive? Was it ever in use elsewhere?

Yep, brand new drive, right out of the box. Thanks for the tip on the disk tests -- I will try that now and report back after it's through ...

 

[videojanitor]

Test results: Passed both the short and the long test. I guess I will play this one by ear and see if I can see a pattern as to what is happening. The only time I have encountered it is when rewinding into the buffer. Never seen it happen when watching "live" or playing recorded content.

 

[cfb]

For some reason that symptom (only when rewinding in the buffer) rings a bell but I cant place it. Let me think on it and look around a little. I havent had that problem, but I remember some other folks having it.

One of the things I like to do with a brand new drive is to stick it on a pc and run a full bad sector test with whatever disk tool the disk maker provides. Its painful with TB drives since it takes all night, but it helps mark any bad spots and gives the drive a good 4-8 hour workout which might uncover any early glitchies before you go through all the trouble of putting the drive in the HR.

You didnt happen to note if there were any jumpers on the drive before you installed it?

 

[videojanitor]

cfb ... thanks for offering to look around for some info. To answer your question, no, I don't recall if there were any jumpers on the drive. I don't THINK there were -- I bought it from Amazon and it was an OEM drive, and usually those don't come with jumpers. But if you think this might be an issue, I can pop the top and have a look.

 

[cfb]

You could check the documentation on the WD web site to see if there are any that might make a difference. I looked up the model # you listed and google gave a few hits for that exact model and then asked "did you really mean?" with some letters transposed.

Even with the right model, WD likes to do stuff like change the number of platters while keeping the model # the same. I have a WD 1TB drive from one of their original batch which had more platters, and an identical drive from a while later after they increased the data density and dropped a platter. The latter is reasonably fast but the older drive is ridiculously, abysmally slow.

The biatch about looking for stuff related to stuttering video is that it appears that there are 48 different words for video stutter and some sort of mandatory rotation of word usage by internet posters.

 

[videojanitor]

Whoops ... looks like I transposed a couple of letters there. Should be WD10EVDS. Here's a link to a page on the WD site that shows the jumper options:

Specifications for the 1 and 2 TB WD AV-GP internal hard drive (WD10EVDS, WD20EVDS)

I've been using the machine all day watching a couple of baseball games, and there have been no problems at all. Perhaps just the restart process was enough to clear it up?

 

[cfb]

Yeah, the only jumper I can see that might be an issue is the 1.5G/s one.

Directv doesnt say much about how the software works internally with the hard drive, so its hard to speculate. The WAG that I can come up with is that you had a hard to read sector in the part of the hard drive where the buffer is stored, and it was marked for replacement and that happened when you rebooted.

Only other WAG that I can think of is that when you put in a new hard drive, the system gets really, really busy for the first day or so downloading and indexing a full set of guide data and doing a whole bunch of setup stuff like working out its to-do list as you jam it up with a bunch of new (to the drive) series links and so forth.

So it might have just been really, really busy and the reboot was coincidental with it wrapping up what it was busy doing.

Stuttering is usually related to a bad read sector though. I *do* remember some funny symptom related to stutters that happened only in the buffer. Wish I could find the info on it.

 

[videojanitor]

OK, well thanks for all the info! I will be keeping an eye on this thing to see if starts happening again, and if so, figure out what to do about it. As long as I wasn't missing something like an obvious jumper setting, that's all I was worried about for the moment.

 

[theph0xx]

Wanting to add a 2TB external to my HR21/700. Anyone out there have a specific model that will work? I can't seem to find specifics on such a combination. Much appreciated.