USB External Drive HR24

[bobvick]

I thought I would post this as a FYI or for some folks that want to to test. I had read over at DBS Talk about someone had tried to hook up a external HDD using the USB port rather than the eSATA port on a HR24, and the poster claimed to have success. On Sunday, I was going through some things in my desk, and found a Western Digital MyBook that I had previously used when I had Dish Network for an external drive. I first tried it on my HR24-500 that has the latest national release for the HR24, the drive was found by the receiver on reboot, but an error message came up on that box that the hard drive had malfunctioned.
I decided to try the drive on my HR24-200 that has the CE firmware from 7/27-28 loaded on it, that is the last CE that I have did. I checked to see that the drive (internal) on the receiver was 75% free, that way I would know for sure if it did pick up on the external HDD.
I plugged the 1TB MyBook into the USB port on the back of the HR24-200, and rebooted. The screen came up and said that the receiver was formatting the hard drive, after the receiver booted all the way up, I checked and seen that I had 100% of the drive free, all of my custom channel lists were reset, and my series links were gone too. This confirmed that it worked.
I have been using it since Sunday and have downloaded several on demand shows to the drive and recorded several shows and movies.
I just thought I would post to see if anyone else had gave it a try, or to let folks know that it is working with some receivers and CE versions if they would like to try it out.

 

[gadgtfreek]

Interesting.

 

[dfergie]

Interesting.

Very...

 

[whitewolf8214]

Very Interesting

 

[dfergie]

Tried it with a 2 TB Seagate I purchased for my Dish dvr, it works on my HR24-500! I hope this stays around as usb drives have been very stable with my Dish dvrs and have had a better track record with me than eSATA drives with DIRECTV...

 

[digiblur]

Now if we could use both the internal and external.

Sent from my C64 w/Epyx FastLoad cartridge

 

[dfergie]

Yup, it read 100% available and only saw the titles on my HR20 via mrv ...

 

[bobvick]

Oh well, looks like with the HR24-200 at least, they have disabled the feature with this latest CE. I haven't unplugged the EHD and rebooted, but that's how it appears as of now. Maybe better luck next time.

 

[Jimbo]

I thought I would post this as a FYI or for some folks that want to to test. I had read over at DBS Talk about someone had tried to hook up a external HDD using the USB port rather than the eSATA port on a HR24, and the poster claimed to have success. On Sunday, I was going through some things in my desk, and found a Western Digital MyBook that I had previously used when I had Dish Network for an external drive. I first tried it on my HR24-500 that has the latest national release for the HR24, the drive was found by the receiver on reboot, but an error message came up on that box that the hard drive had malfunctioned.
I decided to try the drive on my HR24-200 that has the CE firmware from 7/27-28 loaded on it, that is the last CE that I have did. I checked to see that the drive (internal) on the receiver was 75% free, that way I would know for sure if it did pick up on the external HDD.
I plugged the 1TB MyBook into the USB port on the back of the HR24-200, and rebooted. The screen came up and said that the receiver was formatting the hard drive, after the receiver booted all the way up, I checked and seen that I had 100% of the drive free, all of my custom channel lists were reset, and my series links were gone too. This confirmed that it worked.
I have been using it since Sunday and have downloaded several on demand shows to the drive and recorded several shows and movies.
I just thought I would post to see if anyone else had gave it a try, or to let folks know that it is working with some receivers and CE versions if they would like to try it out.

Soooo ... Did you go back to the other HD to verify that you didn't just reformat your original HD ?

 

[dfergie]

I figured they would, I went ahead and hooked up the EHDD to my ViP622, formatted and have already moved about 30 gigs to ...

 

[Jimbo]

Oh well, looks like with the HR24-200 at least, they have disabled the feature with this latest CE. I haven't unplugged the EHD and rebooted, but that's how it appears as of now. Maybe better luck next time.

This usually means it's something coming, the fact that they took it away just means they are still working on it, it will more than likely be back later when other things are cleared up.

I thought the idea behind using ESATA over USB was that it was more reliable and ran faster ... of course that was back in '06 or there abouts.
Wonder if they are still using that generation USB or have advanced to the current stuff ....

 

[bobvick]

Soooo ... Did you go back to the other HD to verify that you didn't just reformat your original HD ?

Yes, it was running off of the EHD, because since the USB quit working with this CE, I have all of the original recordings and series links that were on the internal drive.

 

[jcrandall]

This is just my theory/thoughts. USB2 has not advanced over the past 5 years, it is still a max of 480mb/s. Esata also has not changed, and is 1.5Gb/s or 3.0Gb/s. The USB2 standard would probably meet the needs of a HR2x functions, but there could be times it may not - especially if a drive acts up (bad sectors) or someone maxes out the capability (think two OTA records, a MRV playback, a local playback, and a VOD download, that is 5 things at once).

My theory is that the receiver software has long had support for USB just like eSATA, that it was just turned off. Just a theory, but if somehow the flag that turns USB off in the receiver was accidentally changed, it is a simple as turning it back off.

I think they don't want the nightmare of tech supporting external drives. eSATA is less likely to have problems with triple the speed capability (not that it is all used). And to be frank, if you're willing to spend/obtain an eSATA drive, you already know what you are doing, and are far less likely to need support.

 

[lparsons21]

I tend to think that since the external drive is used for all functions instead of just an archive/play function, that USB2 might have issues with doing multiple things as you note.

That said, I always thought it an idiotic idea that the external drive replace the internal one to begin with. It just makes more sense for an external drive to be an extension of the internal one. Dish actually got it right with their approach. Use it as an external archive/play drive and tie it to the account and not the specific receiver. That makes the external drive a much more valued storage device.

As it sits right now, I don't use an external since whichever drive is in use, it is tied to the specific receiver. Its value isn't much imo.

 

[cypherstream]

I tend to think that since the external drive is used for all functions instead of just an archive/play function, that USB2 might have issues with doing multiple things as you note.

That said, I always thought it an idiotic idea that the external drive replace the internal one to begin with. It just makes more sense for an external drive to be an extension of the internal one. Dish actually got it right with their approach. Use it as an external archive/play drive and tie it to the account and not the specific receiver. That makes the external drive a much more valued storage device.

As it sits right now, I don't use an external since whichever drive is in use, it is tied to the specific receiver. Its value isn't much imo.

I 100% agree with you.

No external drives here. Why bother.

 

[dfergie]

This is the reason I do not archive unless forced to (Olympics in 3D) with my DIRECTV sub, I've had very poor results with eSATA compared to usb... (lost 2 drives & contents with DIRECTV, none with DISH) Threads at the other place reflected problems with eSATA not just with DIRECTV but with pcs as well.

 

[detroit_fan]

I 100% agree with you.

No external drives here. Why bother.

why bother? well it took my HR21-700 from 50 hours of HD recording to hundreds of hours, so i think it was a great purchase. who doesn't want more recording time? i do agree that it would be best if it didn't replace the internal one, but i would still say having a 2TB external is much better than the standard HD

 

[bobvick]

why bother? well it took my HR21-700 from 50 hours of HD recording to hundreds of hours, so i think it was a great purchase. who doesn't want more recording time? i do agree that it would be best if it didn't replace the internal one, but i would still say having a 2TB external is much better than the standard HD

That is exactly the reason that I have external drives on two of my receivers. More room for saving more recordings.

 

[lparsons21]

Yeah, you can add or replace the hard drive on the HRs, but the drive is still married to that specific HR. When/if it poops out, there went all your recordings. And that is the reason that I don't give much consideration to the archiving of hundreds of hours of recordings. It will be forever and a day before I get around to watching all of them, and by then the receiver may have pooped out and I'll never see them.

Give me the ability to have an external hard drive that is married to my account that I can store archival stuff on any day. As it sits, and totally from my POV, the larger than life HD isn't all that valuable in a D* system.