VIP 722 4K sector HDD

[KKlare]

I believe there is no PPV on the EHD, only on the internal, FWIW, as we mix EHD with internal.
Figure 4000 to 7000 MB/hr for MPEG-2 OTA HD recordings.
Use 1600 to 3000 MB/hr for MPEG-4 HD.
Use 650 to 900 MB/hr for MPEG-2 SD without ads.
This based on 1500 films and many 100s of series.
Easy to find out if you have EHD enabled and plugged and look at DVR+4+2, send to device.
-Ken

 

[David_Levin]

Alright, after getting DN to tell me they would refund the fee if the drive didn't work I went for it. It took a couple of tries to get the receiver to find the drive for some reason but it found and formatted my 1TB WD green 4K sector drive. I copied a show to the drive and watched part of it.

Horray. After what I've read here and elsewhere about the 4K drives I didn't really expect it to work.

I tried a WD20EARS over the weekend. After 15 minutes it was still trying to format. I needed a timer to fire, so I gave up and rebooted.

Note that the WD Advanced format drive will work on a Legacy system. It just becomes very slow if the sectors are not aligned properly. Pehaps this isn't a big deal for this purpose since everything being stored is way more then 4k (we won't be poking at the 4k sectors with 512 byte ready-modify-write).

I need to check the compatibility jumper when I get home (that's ment to force alignment with single partition xp systems). could mess things up.

I'll try it again, then pop it onto my Unbuntu box to check the sector alignment.

I'm not sure the SATA <-> USB interface has anything to do with this. The OS still needs to assign the Partitions so they start on proper boundaries and use a sector size that's a multiple of 4k. I can play with this too.

As a side note: Seagate has said that their upcoming 4k sector drives are not going to attempt backward compatibility.