Which External hard drives work on Wallys & Hopper 3s currently?

[CU2000]

Needing to know what External hard drive will work with Hopper 3 & wallys. Do any of the usb powered models work?

 

[Altitudinous]

 

[Altitudinous]

I have a 1TB EHD on a Wally in the RV for DVR function and no moving parts. It is a 2.5" form factor SanDisk SSD running from USB power.
I have a 2TB EHD on a Hopper 3. It is a 3.5" form factor Iomega drive with external power supply.

 

[Jim5506]

I have a 1TB EHD on a Wally in the RV for DVR function and no moving parts. It is a 2.5" form factor SanDisk SSD running from USB power.
I have a 2TB EHD on a Hopper 3. It is a 3.5" form factor Iomega drive with external power supply.

The constant read/write on the SSD will wear it out much faster than it would a spinning drive.
SSD's are not made for constant read/write operations, that is why hard drive makers have AV drives made for constant read/write operations.

 

[Altitudinous]

The constant read/write on the SSD will wear it out much faster than it would a spinning drive.

Can we please give the "SSD will wear out" thing a little rest? Especially on the same day that someone posted about a clicking sound coming from their H3?

The OP asked which drives "will work" with Hopper 3 and Wally. Since I have both of those, with drives connected to each, I was offering what is working for me. I have a reason (an RV many times in motion) for using an SSD with an occasionally-used Wally (also because I had an SSD sitting around). But it does point out that the USB-powered drives work with a Wally. I haven't tried it with a Hopper 3, but I'm sure there would be plenty of warnings available about that.

As for my H3, you may be pleased to know that the Iomega 3.5" drive that I'm using as an EHD is a spinning drive.

 

[pattykay]

Especially on the same day that someone posted about a clicking sound coming from their H3?

That is coming from where Dish hid the self-destruct bomb.

But it does point out that the USB-powered drives work with a Wally. I haven't tried it with a Hopper 3...

I have tried a Western Digital My Passport 1TB USB 3.0 drive with a Wally. It is a USB-powered drive, and it has worked flawlessly for at least a couple of years. (A Wally would put the most strain on such a drive, since all DVR functionality, including the Live TV buffer, is constantly going through that drive before being displayed on the TV screen.) I don't have a Hopper 3, but this exact same drive has been used many times for transferring recordings to and from Hopper Duo and ViP DVR's on the same account. (After reformatting the drive each time of course, since the formatting used for that is different from the formatting for a Wally.) I have not had any problems using it with those models, either.

 

[Altitudinous]

That is coming from where Dish hid the self-destruct bomb.

In order to clear out the pipeline of H3 units by incenting the masses to purchase their own "new" H3, prior to introducing the H4 "Jupiter-Saturn and Uranus Conjunction" with 256 tuners.

 

[Foxbat]

Can we please give the "SSD will wear out" thing a little rest?

I’m not sure that the Intel 256 GB SATA SSD that died at work “wore out” or rolled over the Power-on Timer register, but the end result was the same: we had a 2.5” SATA brick. Unusable for all practical purposes.

 

[bookworm370]

You can easily use an SSD, if you want to spend the money for no gain being that the interface is USB2. As long as you use the drive for movies, shows and event storage and keep the programming there then wear is not a problem as the cells are burned once and not rewritten again.

Now if you use it as temp storage, "Say to store stuff until your kids or spouse watch it and then you delete it", transferring another show can possible hit the same block of the one that what used which you erased, causing another bit-burn if a bit has changed.

SSD controllers are smart enough to resist wear by looking at the content of a block that is being written and will only change a bit on a byte (8 bits per byte) if the new bit is different than the existing one. That way a level is not lost in that cell. So if a 1 is being replaced with a 1 then it doesn't change it. If a 0 is being replaced with a 1 then a level in the cell has to be 'burned' to change the cell state.

Also every SSD is over-provisioned with lots of extra blocks. So if you buy a 512 Gig SSD there is probably between 600gig to 1TB of actual storage. The extra is used by the SSD controller's algorithm in wear leveling. Higher end (read expensive) SSD's have more "extra" blocks on them than cheaper ones do. A no-name cheapo might have only 200meg extra while a Samsung, WD Black or other big names can come with a lot more even up to 512gig or more. The same ratio holds true on terabyte SSD. A 2TB SSD probably has 3TB of space on it.

So bottom line, there is a whole lot of fancy SH--T that the manufactures do to prevent failures. But if you use one (like for a paging disk) then don't be surprised if it goes TU in a year or so. But if you use it for static storage, like shows you intend to keep or even on PC's there is a whole pile of stuff (like the operating system DLL's, EXE's, and stuff like that that hardly ever change unless there is a system update. So in real PC scenerios, most likely only a 10th of what is showed as used, is actually changed often while 90% of the files never change. That's why SSD's seem to last forever on a PC or MAC.

So no technical reason you can't use an SSD EHD on a Hopper as the SSD Sata controller makes the SSD look and behave exactly like a spinning drive with moving read/write heads. It's all smoke and mirrors in the SATA world.

Now when you start to use NVMe drives, that's horse of a different color. The firmware on the machine and the drivers treat NVMe drives completely differently. But that's a discussion for later.

So if you want to use a 3 times more expensive SSD instead of a real HD, then go ahead. But you won't notice any performance update as it's the USB buss that is limiting the transfer speed.

OK, elevator speech done again! LOL

 

[Altitudinous]

the end result was the same: we had a 2.5” SATA brick.

That's interesting. And I think many of us have had a 2.5" IDE, EIDE, and even SATA spinning hard drive brick. But we should probably hark back to the poster's question...EHDs that will work with H3s and Wallys.

 

[Altitudinous]

You can easily use an SSD

Exactly. I had an SSD sitting around that I had upgraded from, and I repurposed it to use as an EHD for a Wally. Maybe it'll fail. Maybe it'll just sit there, unaffected by temperature and vibration and be a decent solution for a Wally in an RV. But I appreciate the "expensive SSD instead of a real HD" thing.

 

[Foxbat]

I do not have a Wally, but my understanding is the Wally works like the ViP 211 before, the EHD is used for long-term archival as well as a 60 minute trick play buffer. The archival function is a write once, read many situation which will not tax the SSD's flash memory cells, but the replay buffer is being written to constantly, even with the Wally turned off (again, assuming behavior that mirrors the ViP 211). SSDs are usually rated in a factor of total drive space for total writes, like 30x or 100x.

I believe the Intel SSD that died at work had a firmware bug that caused the drive to go into a failure mode (Write-locked) after 32,767 hours of operation since the SMART counter said the drive had 10 hours or so of Power-On time, which made sense given when the user said the notebook failed. So, if you decide on an SSD, maybe best to avoid Intel, or at least keep the firmware up to date.

Using an SSD in a mobile application to eliminate the possibility of hard drive damage due to shock makes sense. But one could argue that the shock occurs when the vehicle is in motion, and you're probably not watching satellite TV at that time. If your Wally or Hopper were powered down while driving, the DVR shouldn't be receiving that high of shock to cause damage to the parked heads,

The prices on SSDs are at an all-time low (and should continue to drop). SATA SSDs over a USB 2 connection are more than capable of transferring data at the rates needed for smooth recording and playback.

I drop one more tidbit here. Steve Gibson is working on a new tool to benchmark Hard Drives as well as SSDs. During testing of the new version of SpinRite running against some SSDs, he was seeing inconsistent results across the SSD. Some SSDs see no difference between the low-numbered sectors through the high-numbered sectors. Some, however, seem to be uncharacteristically slow at the beginning of the SSD, then returning to "normal" transfer speeds further from the start of the drive. He published a detailed data table at his site, GRC.com, which reports on eleven drives he measured:

Gibbson Research ReadSpeed Report on SSD Performance - Details​

Some drives were SATA and some were IDE, all numbers are Megabytes/Second, many samples (listed) were averaged to get the reported values. The Samsung EVO drive shows why it has a premium price compared to lower-cost options.

 

[bookworm370]

I didn't know the Wally used the EHD as it's trick play buffer. So in a Wally case, then an SSD EHD would be a very bad idea. But in a Hopper, it's perfectly fine.

Thanks for pointing that out Foxbat

 

[pattykay]

I do not have a Wally, but my understanding is the Wally works like the ViP 211 before, the EHD is used for long-term archival as well as a 60 minute trick play buffer. The archival function is a write once, read many situation which will not tax the SSD's flash memory cells, but the replay buffer is being written to constantly, even with the Wally turned off (again, assuming behavior that mirrors the ViP 211).

Don't forget the 7-day guide, which is also stored on the external hard drive. Those guide downloads also occur when the Wally is turned off. However the Wally, just like the ViP211 series, does have a two-day guide without any hard drive attached. So, you would think that maybe it is only storing the remaining five days of guide data on the hard drive. However, whenever the hard drive is unhooked, the Wally needs to take a fresh guide download again. So, I would guess that the entire 7-day guide is being stored on the external hard drive, and the internal storage space reserved for the two-day guide data is only used when there is no hard drive to use for storing the guide data.

 

[Foxbat]

Side note: I was able to download a firmware update from the notebook manufacturer and it updated the firmware on the bricked Intel SSD which now allows me to Clean and Re-Image the drive! Yay!

 

[Almighty1]

View attachment 149352

Can the Hopper 3 (H3) really use all the capacity of a 7TB drive since I thought 2TB was the largest it would allow usable per drive?

 

[pattykay]

Can the Hopper 3 (H3) really use all the capacity of a 7TB drive since I thought 2TB was the largest it would allow usable per drive?

The trick would be to actually find a 7TB drive, since the standard sizes are 6TB and 8TB. People have had mixed results. Trying a single 8TB drive, it was not recognized at all. Trying a 6TB drive, one member was successfully able to add a 2TB drive, for a total of 8TB. However, another member with a 6TB drive was not able to get the Hopper 3 to recognize a 1.5 TB drive. In any event, at least 6TB will actually work. It is when you try to approach or exceed the 7TB "limit" where things start to get weird.

 

[Radioguy41]

I do not have a Wally, but my understanding is the Wally works like the ViP 211 before, the EHD is used for long-term archival as well as a 60 minute trick play buffer. The archival function is a write once, read many situation which will not tax the SSD's flash memory cells, but the replay buffer is being written to constantly, even with the Wally turned off (again, assuming behavior that mirrors the ViP 211).

Exactly. When I walk by the Wally in the bedroom I can hear the drive spinning and see the led blinking when it's "turned off" (it never really is off, only in standby). Same for the one in the living room. In that situ an SSD would not be a good idea

 

[bookworm370]

The trick would be to actually find a 7TB drive, since the standard sizes are 6TB and 8TB. People have had mixed results. Trying a single 8TB drive, it was not recognized at all. Trying a 6TB drive, one member was successfully able to add a 2TB drive, for a total of 8TB. However, another member with a 6TB drive was not able to get the Hopper 3 to recognize a 1.5 TB drive. In any event, at least 6TB will actually work. It is when you try to approach or exceed the 7TB "limit" where things start to get weird.

Yup, and I can report that the 6+2 combination still works in U939. Probably shouldn't talk too loud or someone at Dish may just "fix" it!

But, it's is a combination of the right drives, and the right hub (non-powered) and plugged in a specific order. I have 3 drives, 1 6TB and 2 2TB's. To use the other 2TB, I just unplug the current 2TB drive, get the disconnect message, plug in the other 2TB drive and wait for it to be recognized. Luckily one of the 2TB drives is just for my wife's Christmas movies so hopefully I won't be swapping drives in and out so often.

Oh, btw, for those in the know. I just found the mcd's card under a pile of my paperwork. Will get it out! My bad.

 

[Almighty1]

The trick would be to actually find a 7TB drive, since the standard sizes are 6TB and 8TB. People have had mixed results. Trying a single 8TB drive, it was not recognized at all. Trying a 6TB drive, one member was successfully able to add a 2TB drive, for a total of 8TB. However, another member with a 6TB drive was not able to get the Hopper 3 to recognize a 1.5 TB drive. In any event, at least 6TB will actually work. It is when you try to approach or exceed the 7TB "limit" where things start to get weird.

I thought Seagate did make a 7TB drive called the Ironwolf assuming one is able to get their hands on it. I had a external HDD dock that worked on the Hopper 1 but was not recognized with the Hopper 3. Now the other question is, is it true that one can do 21TB max over 3 devices as mentioned here:

Product Focus: Hopper 3 - Now with 20 TB DVR!

During the month of March a new software version has been deployed to all models of Hopper, all Joeys, and Wally. In addition to improving the look and function of the On Demand channel, you can now store and access up to 20 TB of content when using external hard drives. Your clients will...

www.cepro.com

Right now, I have 1 drive that is a 3.5" Western Digital 2TB using a USB 2.0 to SATA adapter cable, 2 x USB 3.0 2.5" Ultra external Western Digital drives all connected to a USB 3.0 hub. Has anyone tried more than 3 drives via a USB hub?