Second 721 died on me

[jbones]

I've had the 721 for as long as it has been available with very few operating problems. But last night my hard drive died in my current 721. This is the second time this has happened. Dish is now sending me out my third 721 since I've started. To Dish's credit this receiver was not under warranty so the CSR suggested to buy the extended warranty for $5.99 and they would send out another reciever with shipping paid. I told her sign me up sounds like a no brainer to me. Is anyone else having problems with their hard drives failing? Hopefully this third one will last.

 

[David]

I have owned two 721's since they first hit the market. Each one has been replaced twice due to hard drive failures. The failures occurred with absolutely no warning--worked one minute and not the next. I have the DHP so it cost me nothing to replace. DISH was very prompt in sending replacement units. I have no complaints...

 

[gary s]

We recently had our "disc failure" on one of our two 721s. I guess this is the same as a hard drive failure. I don't remember what dishnetwork csrs had me do, but it didn't help. The receiver still said disc failure. I set up a return authorization. We are also on the DHP so it was free of charge. After hanging up the phone from talking with dishnetwork I unplugged the receiver for about an hour and a half, plugged it back in, turned it on, and it was working fine (although it had wiped out all the PVR recordings). I called dishnetwork back and told them the receiver was working. They said the RA was already started and couldn't be stopped. So, we received the exchange 721 in a couple days. I decided to go ahead and send back the one that had malfunctioned and keep the replacement, thinking that once the disc had failed it might be likely to happen again. Replacement 721 is working great so far. Dishnetwork was great about the whole exchange process.

 

[Pepper]

Too hot to handle...

IMHO, it is a cooling problem.

The design of the 721 and its sibling 522 (and presumably, the 625) suffers from poor design for heat dissipation. The longer it runs, the hotter the disk drive gets, and it is just about as far as it could be from the ventilation holes on the opposite side of the box. If you have it inside any type of enclosure, it just makes it worse.

gary, yours that sat for 1.5 hours and then worked again, probably was working because it cooled down enough to operate properly. It would have failed again.

My 522 hard drives live on the outside of the box, (power & IDE cables extended, note I was real careful about the "warranty void" sticker) so they are exposed directly to a roomful of conditioned air. Also before I did this, I made sure the units are NOT inside of anything but on top of a shelf. I found some old plastic cassette cases and put two of those underneath each box so there's about another half-inch of airflow available. Sitting outside the box, the drives are warm to the touch but not dangerously hot as when installed in the sealed box. Barring accidental damage because they are exposed, I expect them to last a whole lot longer.

Rewiring the fan so that it's on all the time might be another solution (or, if Dish would change the software to lower the threshold temp that activates the fan). I also seriously considered cutting a hole in the top of the case to attach another always on fan there as well.

 

[Stargazer]

I like the extended power and IDE cables idea to have external hard drive. This would be neat to swap a hard drive and connect the one that was connected to the 522 to a computer as an external hard drive as well. What would be even better is to have a switch to flip to control which hard drive you are running if you wanted to connect multiple hard drives. Has anyone come up with a way to connect the DVR directly to a computer through the IDE port to dump the content directly the computer's hard drive or is it possible to connect the same hard drive up to the 522 and computer at the same time or perhaps connect a switch that would allow you to choose whether you wanted the 522 or the computer to have access to that hard drive.

Sorry for getting off topic a little bit. I figured that those would be ways to prevent from losing the data from the hard drives due to failure and to backup the content. I had a 721 fail because of a tuner failure (also had two out of three 501's fail because of a tuner failure). I only had one hard drive failure and that was in my first 501.

Perhaps they should make all receivers DVR capable without a built in hard drive and make an expansion port for an IDE cable to clip on an external hard drive to it. If hard drive fails or if you want a larger one or an additional one, you can upgrade it or ship one back and get another one as a replacement.

 

[Pepper]

To keep from deviating too far from the original poster's intent, which was about hard drive failures, there is a discussion about external hard drives here: http://www.satelliteguys.us/showthread.php?t=40000