Visionsat IV200 Hard Drives

[avg1joe]

I received my new visionsat in the mail the other day and I love it! The menus and overall setup is very different and a little less user friendly than the traxis 3500 but I'm having fun figuring out how everything works.

I'd like to add a usb drive but don't want to spend money on a drive that won't work. In Iceburg's review he mentioned that his Maxtor was incompatible and that Western Digital or Seagates are compatible.

For those of you who currently have a drive working with a visionsat could you tell me what drives or memory sticks you've had success with and those that didn't work? I'm looking for real world experience with specific drives/brands.

 

[Mr Tony]

I currently have a WD 320GB drive and it works great

also used a couple sandisk flash drives (1GB, 2GB & 4GB) with no issues

The maxtor hard drives will not work for some reason

 

[gabshere]

couple sandisk flash drives (1MB, 2MN & 4MB) with no issues

man i can remember when a 5 meg hard drive was all you would ever need , no way to use it all up lol

 

[Mr Tony]

whoops

changed to GB

 

[sprouts]

Using a Elements 250GB with no problems. Powered by Western Digital.

todd

 

[SatelliteAV]

According to the importer, the hard drive incompatibilities were corrected in the last firmware update. They suggested that all USB 2.0 supported devices are now compatible up to 500GB.

 

[avg1joe]

Thanks for the info. I hooked up a 120gb seagate last night, formatted it and was recording/timeshifting within minutes. I bought the seagate off Tiger Direct for $49.

 

[Anole]

I have some discontinued Western Digital Pasport USB 2.0 drives of various sizes.
They actually contain 2.5" 5400 rpm laptop hard drives.
I recently bought them (new) to harvest the drives to put in some old laptops.
The sizes are 40gb, 60gb, and 80gb.

Having used the units as external data modules on my computer, I find that they're a little slow.
Anyone have any experience with an external drive like this on the IV200, and is its performance okay?

I suspect the 320 gb USB module Iceberg is describing is based on a 3.5" 7200 rpm drive.

 

[avg1joe]

Now that I've started recording onto the hard drive I've noticed some possible issues.

There have been a couple of times when a timed record didn't record correctly. If there are a couple of shows back to back and the end/start times are the same then it didn't appear to record. In other words if one show is 6:00-7:00 and another is 7:00-8:00 on the same channel and I set up the timer that way the visionsat didn't record. Setting the timer from 6:00-8:00 works but then you have to fast forward through an hour if you watch the first show then come back at a later time to watch the second show. Setting it to 6:00-6:59 and 7:00-8:00 also doesn't appear to work. This failure to record has only happened a couple of times and its possible I screwed something up. Anyone else notice this issue?

Also if I have recorded 2 shows from 6:00-8:00 it is possible to watch the first hour show, press the pause button, the play button and then the red button, making a bookmark on the video slider. I thought I could then stop the video, come back later and skip to that bookmark. This is a very convenient feature except when I go back later (after watching and recording other things) the bookmarks are gone so I have to fast forward through an hour of video. Has anyone been able to get bookmarks to "stick" over a period of time?

I'm using version v0112 of the firmware.

 

[avg1joe]

Visionsat iv200 recording and playback

For back to back shows I usually leave two minutes off the end of the first show (hoping this is commercials) to give a two minute gap for the receiver to decide to stop recording and start again. This seems to work the best for me.

I still haven't figured out what the point of the bookmark feature is. It doesn't seem to leave a bookmark if you hit stop and later play the recorded show again.

If you don't hit stop you can use the bookmarks to jump to different areas in the recording but its pretty rare that I would want to do that.

No one has commented on these issues since October. Any advice or similar experiences.

I'm now running firmware version 120.

 

[ng54]

Bought a $9 conversion cable from fleabay. it converts pata and sata to usb2. Works perfectly with my very old WD 40gig drive.

 

[Tron]

Using a 500 gig MyBook on my Visionsat with no problem. Drive powers up and down with the receiver. Its recording from NASA-TV as I type this

 

[Mr Tony]

I dont know how the bookmark option works but have used a WD320GB drive with no issues. Has about 15 things recorded on it right now

 

[avg1joe]

When I first was trying to use the pvr functions on the receiver I was looking for instructions. The manual that came in the box didn't say much about recording, if I remember correctly.

Somewhere (this was six months ago) I downloaded a pdf file called "pvr functions iv200 2007".

On pages 7 and 8 it has instructions for bookmarking during playback.

I'm not sure if the guys in the white hats or black hats wrote this pdf but pressing the red button does put a green line on the playback bar with the factory firmware versions I've run.