Transfer to EHD, How much is too much

bwexler

SatelliteGuys Pro
Original poster
Nov 29, 2007
748
268
San Marcos, CA
I have my 2 new Hopper with Sling Still in the box.
I am transferring programs from my main Hopper 2K to EHD.
The H 2K had 48 GB free space when I started on Friday, now there it has 548GB free space. Progress is slow.

Yesterday afternoon I selected a bunch of stuff to transfer. The dialog box said 34 hours to complete. It counted down pretty quickly to about 14 hours. About 9:00 PM it was at 4:45 to go, when I returned home this afternoon it was still at 4:45 hours to go. I hit stop several times. no reaction, so I did a red button reset (everything else was working, recording viewing etc).

My question is what is the maximum amount of programing you can select and successfully transfer at one time, and how can you tell how much you have grabbed BEFORE you hit the transfer button? I might select Bones or NCIS that might have over 100+ episodes with 1 click.
 
It could be a particular recording that is causing your transfer to hang up. I had a similar problem on Sunday where I was transferring recordings from an EHD to the Hopper. I had to select individual events instead of the group to get around the problem. One event never could be transferred when selected and the only fix was to do the red button reset. I do not know what the limit is--I successfully transferred over 100 1/2 hour recordings at one time once.

I would try to determine what the last recording was that transferred successfully. The next one that did not transfer could be causing the problem you are having.
 
One of my HWS is having problems. It only can connect to 110. 129,119, and 61.5 show red. My other HWS is fine. I connected both Joey's to the good HWS. In case they have to replace the bad HWS, I have transferred the bad HWS DVR programs to an EHD. I selected about 25% at a time ( about 4 hours transfer time ) and everything went smoothly. It took about 16 hours to transfer about 300 hours of programming ( mixed SD and HD ).
 
I have been transferring since Friday and still have over 600 hours to go.
i am also starting to see the 4 seconds left error on a few recordings.

the best Dish tech support could do was to tell me I needed to use an adaqute power cord. They didn't even mention weather that was for the Hopper, the EHD or the TV, or maybe the vacuum cleaner.
long ago they told me the reason they limited the number of items in the select to transfer screen, was so you could not select to many items at once and overwhelm the Hoppers memory (RAM).
 
If you are transferring HD from satellite with a 5400 or 7200rpm drive you might expect it to take 1/20 of the run time.
Actually the time required depends more on the MB to be transferred.

Figure about 2000MB/hr for MPEG-4 HD, 1000MB/hr or less for MPEG-2 SD, 4000-6000 for MPEG-2 OTA with no sub-channels.
While it can do very large, read long, transfers, it is best to check regularly that the transfer is progressing.

I'm having a number of hangs at 1 to 5 seconds left. Many repeat if tried again. This is new with this version.
A hang blocks further use of the EHD with only the red-button/cord-pull reset to clear it. A pain.
Do wait a minute before reboot because sometimes it is slowed by other things like mounting or ending another drive.

The initial time estimate is fallacious--I have seen 250 or more hours for what took 10 or less minutes. Totally wrong.
Within 1 minute or so the estimate is useful. Dish you can do this better.

-Ken
 
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