Western Digital makes a nice 4TB (dual 2TB) RAID external drive for recordings you don't want to lose.
Yup. Have one too and it works great, BUT it requires the user to move material from the internal to the external. Redundancy should be automatic. The other current issue with externals is you can't see their content from DishAnywhere.
What I'd like to see is a way to add an external redundant drive to the receiver. So that any programs recorded to the internal are mirrored to the external without user involvement. If the receiver craps out, replacing the receiver triggers a transfer from the external mirror to the internal in the new receiver so no programming is lost with the receiver swap.
As the internal fills up, there needs to be a way to move content to an external WITHOUT loosing visibility of it. Currently, you need to know which external drive the program is on and switch to that to find the program in the list. What would be best is the ability to define an external as an expansion to the internal drive so when the internal fills up, new recordings simply go to the external. Currently, this happens within a drive since each is partitioned into smaller pieces and the partitions are hidden from the user.
Dish needs to officially support external RAIDs. They work now, Dish just needs to admit that.
So combining all that, an example of what could be possible:
Internal 2 TB
External 1 is mirror for internal
External 2 is expansion to internal
External 3 is mirror to external 2
External 4 is a RAID for archival storage
External 5 is another drive for additional archival storage
External 2 could be a RAID, making external 3 unnecessary.
Mirrors and RAIDs would be optional.
Expanding the capacity of the DVR will undoubtably require better content management. Consider a system that has four external 6 TB drives attached and all full. That's a huge list of programs to sort through without help.
Currently we can have folders on the internal drive but only one layer (no folders within folders). Nested folders need to be allowed and the mechanism extended to external drives. Other filtering mechanisms can also be used with user editable tags.
Current external drives can not be named. Their identification is automatically generated (External 1, External 2, etc.) based on the order they are discovered each time the receiver boots. Expansion of the DVR functionality will require the ability to name external drives. Content lists need the ability to show content on all drives or single one or more out for display.