Portable Hard Drive without External Power works on Hopper

TIME will tell.

I don't see the hopper having a long lifespan. The electrolyte will soon dry out in the caps, and once the caps loose their value, it's all downhill from there.

Since I have the protection plan, I don't really give a rat's behind if my receiver starts going bad. As long as I can xfer the recordings from the dying hopper, dish will 2nd day me a replacement.
 
The Joey DOES have a external power supply. They should of done so with the hopper. They could of made a much smaller receiver, the same size as Directv's HDDVR, or even smaller.
Funny thing about that, the Joey also runs pretty dang hot internally. There was even a fan header on the mainboard PCB that was removed. So the engineers probably intended for the CPU heatsink to have a fan, but the bean counters said otherwise.

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Funny thing about that, the Joey also runs pretty dang hot internally. There was even a fan header on the mainboard PCB that was removed. So the engineers probably intended for the CPU heatsink to have a fan, but the bean counters said otherwise.

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The most critical aspect of any electronic component is keeping the power supply cool. The Most cpus can withstand temps of 150F.

But overheat the psu, your gonna dry the caps. The capacitor is the ONLY part of a power supply that contains a liquid. Resistors, transistors, etc are solid. A resistor can withstand a temp over 300F.

Most of your old tube radios go bad because the caps dry out in them over time. The old style caps dried out a lot faster.

Anyhoo, the psu is the heart of the system. If the psu starts going bad, it can affect everything it's attached to.
 
I don't see the hopper having a long lifespan.

Lol...I'm pretty certain extensive testing was done with this receiver and I'm sure they knew what they were doing when they designed this. I don't think they would pump so much money into R&D and testing and marketing to push this product so hard just to have a device that's going to crap out after a short time. As stated above, time will tell.
 
Lol...I'm pretty certain extensive testing was done with this receiver and I'm sure they knew what they were doing when they designed this. I don't think they would pump so much money into R&D and testing and marketing to push this product so hard just to have a device that's going to crap out after a short time. As stated above, time will tell.

In 3 years, the hopper will most likely be old news, and I'm sure dish will come out with something new. A SIX TUNER would be nice. I have over 15 channels I like, kinda hard to record as much as I would like to with 3 tuners.

But, if one were to own the hopper a really long time, it would most likely poop out within 5-7 years.
 
The most critical aspect of any electronic component is keeping the power supply cool. The Most cpus can withstand temps of 150F.

But overheat the psu, your gonna dry the caps. The capacitor is the ONLY part of a power supply that contains a liquid. Resistors, transistors, etc are solid. A resistor can withstand a temp over 300F.

Most of your old tube radios go bad because the caps dry out in them over time. The old style caps dried out a lot faster.

Anyhoo, the psu is the heart of the system. If the psu starts going bad, it can affect everything it's attached to.

Joey CPU regularly hits 160+. Could cause weird issues such as reboots.

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That's not good. Max according to dish is 150. Is your joey on it's side? That might help.

Nah, I don't want them vertical, I know that they tend to run cooler but it's not my fault that the design is the way it is. They're stable though so I guess that's all that matters. I do have them on the stand, just horizontal, but they're totally out in the open on hard surfaces.

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At 5 volts, 1 amp is 5 watts, 2 is 10 watts.

I'm sure the PSU has plenty of power, but, it all depends on how much power is granted to the usb port. A computers power supply is 10-20 amps, but most usb ports are .5 amps. Some are more if the motherboard has a "super charger" function built in.

I had something sarcastic here, but I took it out. Per port is 2.5w.

Some older drives that were bus powered had dual connectors, one red, one black to draw more current. My external slim bluray drive on my Mac also does as it needs more than 2.5w.

Newer bus powered drives are 2.5 inch models that don't require much in the way of power.

USB 3 is supposed to have a higher powered option, but don't know if that is implemented yet.

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Well last night I backed up about 175 Gb with a Toshina Canvio 500Gb Non-powered external hard drive. Took 6 hours. This normal?
 
Well the drive is USB 3.0/2.0. I can only assume the hopper's usb port is 2.0

USB should transfer around 40 MB/sec. 175Gb is roughly 179,200 Mb.

So it should take around 5120 seconds, or 1.4 hours.

So at 6 hours, that is roughly 10Mb a second. That is rather slow.
 
coinmaster:

There are several potential bottlenecks along the way that could slow throughput down dramatically. Is the content scattered (in need of defragmentation)? This increases seeks and blocks sustained transfers which is where you get your high throughput from.

Are there many small files instead of a few large files? This is brutal for a disk, as the head has to do a lot of back/forth action as it writes to the file system space and the data space which (again) causes seeks etc.

Is there bus contention with other data? It's a shared bandwidth bus, not a switched technology.

Is the target drive low on available space? This can wreak havoc with allocation of blocks as it must place them in available non-contiguous spaces. This also slows down throughput.

Hopper is USB 2.0.
 
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And furthermore, the Hopper has to encrypt all 175GB, which could be the biggest bottleneck right there.
 
The hopper is also very busy while the file copy is happening. It is writing 3 (or 4 if OTA tuner in use) streams to disk all the time for the pause live TV, if not for timers. I do not see the encryption being much overhead since it would be done by the chipset in hardware. After all it has to decrypt anything you watch, the disk is always encrypted.

So, potentially if a couple joeys were in use you could have 3 recording streams and a couple joey streams all hitting the HD at the same time, not counting the EHD copy.
 
I do not see the encryption being much overhead since it would be done by the chipset in hardware. After all it has to decrypt anything you watch, the disk is always encrypted.

I think you are wrong about that. The ASIC definitely does have hardware decryption and decompression; no doubt about that. But we don't know if the hardware has encryption capabilities as well. I'm pretty sure that the VIP series does the EHD encryption in software running on a modestly-powered general-purpose processor, just because they were designed and built long before there was an EHD, and also because the transfer to EHD is as slow as it is. Since the transfer to EHD is still pretty darn slow on a Hopper 1, I think it likely that the Hopper is likewise doing this encryption in a general purpose microprocessor.

Also, the program data stream on satellite is (except for HBO) laid down on disk as is; it is not encrypted. We know this because we can rip programs off the EHD of earlier Dish receivers. IF this is all of a sudden 100 encrypted on the internal disk of the Hopper, then I stand corrected.
 
Once I get a HwS (next month) I will test to see if EHD transfers are faster. With the 2x CPU power we should definitely see a difference if the encryption is done in software (which I bet it is and will be faster.)

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I've transferred to the same EHD with both new and original Hoppers and I didn't notice any difference in transfer speed,but I really didn't pay that much attention to the transfer. I set the events to transfer and went on with my day and came back and the events were transferred.
 

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