The percentage estimate is only measuring the partition of the HDD space for your persoanl TV recording, which include--I think--any donwloaded VOD--NOT the VOD that resides on its own partition. Most of the VOD is now streamed rather than saved on the HDD, so even less worries about HDD space (the Channel 1 and 500 VOD's are save to their own partition of the HDD, I think).
The PTAT takes up relatively very little space on the User partition of the HDD.
That is NOT going to be the source of your storage limitations. Keep in mind that Dish uses MPEG4 for all HD content. In addtion to using the effienct MPEG4, Dish also compresses the data to a fairly high degree, which mean using even LESS space used on the HDD per recorded TV show, and more space for more recordings.
I think the HDD still has a seperate partition for the VOD Channel 1 and 500 that resides on the HDD, however, even that will not be taking up much space on the HDD. You have a TREMENDOUS amont of space still availabe for your personal TV recordings in the user partition even after 2 weeks worth of PTAT. I know this becasue I have an embarrasing TON of TV shows and that uses about 67% of my User partition with my PTAT active for all channels.
One last thing to know is that if you have the system set to automatically "Prepare" recordings for transfer to a mobile device (as I do), then I do believe those additional recordings are stored on your User Partition--HOWEVER, those "Prepared" for transfer to mobile device recordings are drasticlly reduced is size so that they can both be quickly transferd to and be so small as to not take up much room on your mobile device internal or external (SSD Card) memory.
Also, those "Prepared" recordings will automatically be erased from the HDD after a period of time--I know becaue I had to wait through the pain of re-coding many times on recordings I wanted to transfer, but they were older recordings made with the "Auto-Prepare" ON.
If you turn off the "Auto Prepare" or whatever the precise name of that feature, then you could use less space on the HDD, but as I satated above, those very small sized recrodings ready to move to mobile will be erased in not too long of time, so those recordings really won't take up much room on the HDD.
Further, if you turn off the "Auto Preapare" for mobile freature, then the cost to you is that the transfers will take longer because they have to go through the re-code first, and that is a time consuming process that can seem irritating if you are transferring even ONE recording, and even MORE irratating if you are transferring more than one recording, like 4 episodes of some show, for example. But the actual process to transfer is pretty fast; its the re-code that takes time.
I prefer to let the system autmatically re-code all new recordings made becase the temporary space it takes up is minimal compared to how much you can still record for viewing at home or remotely, at least in real-world usage even if the actual number may seem more than incidental. In other words, with PTAT and Auto-prepare on at all times, I experience no real world effect of being limited in recording space--and I record A LOT and leave recordings on the Hopper for me to watch for the very fist time many months or even OVER a year later.
The choice is yours, but if you want to get an external HDD for transferring recordings from the internal HDD to the external because you are tight on HDD space being reported, then that external HDD for archiving is an option.
