........
- you can get a bare drive and an external USB case. I have several.
If you get the right case, you can use a SATA -or- an ATA drive internally.
On some cases, if you want to suck the video off to your computer, you can connect to the box with eSATA, and get a little better throughput.
(but only if the drive is SATA itself)
I don't know if the throughput really matters in the real world.
I make DVDs from recordings, and in the end everything works, so drive throughput within reason is not a major factor.
- most FTA receivers must talk to a hard drive that's been formatted with FAT-32, not NTFS!
Your computer will read both, so that's okay.
Most external USB drives come preformatted FAT32.
Bare drives probably won't be formatted at all.
Some receivers will format the drive, and some will not do it properly.
A couple additional comments. I have several of those external drive enclosures ("case"), however I also have one of those case-less USB drive adapters, that I use all the time to quickly grab data from old hard drives. Even though my computers see this the same as any of the newer enclosures, for some reason, my Coolsat doesn't recognize this USB drive. I have no idea of why, but be aware that some older USB external drives may not work.
Re the FAT-32 thing, it may depend on the drive, and/or version of Windows, but I've had difficulty at times getting Windows XP to format drives in FAT-32. Once I had to take it to an older computer with Win 2K and/or revert to DOS commands, but I finally found (actually my son found) a nice program that formats in FAT32 very quickly.
Since FAT32 doesn't allow big files, the receivers I have divide recordings into multiple files. My Coolsat makes big 4 GB files, but for some reason the one time I tried recording something big on my Diamond, I noticed that it saves files that are something like between 1 and 2 GB, which is strange. Although when playing back files, the receivers generally chain the multiple files together seemlessly, apparently some versions of Coolsat software didn't do this right.
But the ~4 GB limit of FAT32 is interesting. I have several SA TIVOs that are networked, and I can extract recordings from the TIVO to my computer. When I first started doing this years ago, I was extracting to a hard drive that just happened to be a FAT32 drive. The problem, however, is that the program that I was using to extract the files would extract the files even if they were more than the 4 GB maximum....... and it WORKED..... except that it really confused the heck out of my computer. I would end up with 10 GB files on a FAT32 drive, but Windows didn't seem to realize that they were bigger than the 4 GB limit. When I would try to copy these files from one drive to another using explorer (or MyCOmputer), the files would start copying, and you'd get this time remaining progress bar, which would go up to 100% when it got to the first 4 GB, then it would get REAL confused, and the progress bar would go to zero, and it would tell me that I had about 16 years left in the copying process, and it would creep along in this status until it got close to the 2nd 4 GB, then suddenly the progress bar would jump up to close to 100% again, then it would go beserk again, saying it was going to take me forever, until the last 2 GBs were almost done, then it would jump to near 100%, and finish.
This was very strange, but how these files played with VLC was even stranger. If I tried to play one of these files, VLC would play it, and play it completely, however the VLC progress bar would only go up through the first 4 GB. I could pull the VLC progress bar anywhere in the first 4 GB, but if I got too close to the end, it would cause VLC to bomb.
Anyway, just a warning that using FAT32 drives in an NTFS can result in some interesting effects, depending upon what software you use. No real problems, and I do it all the time, just INTERESTING.
