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

[Almighty1]

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.

Interesting, I thought it allowed 3 drives of up to 7TB each making it 21TB 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

I never knew plugging in a specific order would make a difference since I noticed sometimes during the nightly reboots is the H3 would hang at the Hopper screen and it requires unplugging the USB which has the HDD's behind it so the H3 would boot before plugging it in as I have a powered USB 3.0 hub. I don't need all the external drives working at the same time so swapping would work but is there a trick to do the disconnect and reconnecting so the new plugged in drive gets recognized because for me, it seems that I have to hit the red reset button before the H3 will see it and it seems even with the same 3 x 2TB drives plugged in, the way the H3 sees it each time is different as it can assign the 3 drives a different number randomly so each of them can be 2,3,4.

 

[Foxbat]

I trust SatelliteGuys who have done the configurations as opposed to an article “from the Internet” from March of last year. The times I was able to connect multiple drives and have my H3 recognize them, the order was somewhat random, probably related to the order in which they appeared to the Hopper after USB handshaking and spin-up delays.

 

[bookworm370]

Three drives are the max allowed and they have to add up to less then 7gb

If you have 2 drives on a non-powered hub, you can get one 6G and one 2G for up to 8 gig.

 

[Almighty1]

I trust SatelliteGuys who have done the configurations as opposed to an article “from the Internet” from March of last year. The times I was able to connect multiple drives and have my H3 recognize them, the order was somewhat random, probably related to the order in which they appeared to the Hopper after USB handshaking and spin-up delays.

That is true, DISH officially only says up to 7TB drives are supported but not how many. And I have a drive which is Western Digital 3.5" 2TB that works fine in a Thermaltake Dock on a Hopper 2000 but not on the Hopper H3 with the same dock as it will only show partial contents on the screen and when you try to playback, it will show an error code of 1221 which no one else besides me has seen as mentioned in this thread:

External HD Recordings not playing back on Hopper 3, recorded with Hopper 2000

I upgraded to a Hopper 3 DVR on February 7, 2016 as a upgrade to the Hopper 2000. I transferred the recordings to a external Hard Drive from the Hopper 2000. I plugged in the Hard Drive to the Hopper 3 on the rear bottom USB 3.0 port and can select the External Device 1. When I choose the...

www.satelliteguys.us

It will work with other USB 3.0 to SATA/EIDE converter cables and docking stations. However, it seems with the recent Hopper H3 software update from mid January 2021, the issue is that on some reboots which is by random selection, it will not show or detect any of the external HDDs.

 

[Almighty1]

Three drives are the max allowed and they have to add up to less then 7gb

If you have 2 drives on a non-powered hub, you can get one 6G and one 2G for up to 8 gig.

Seems like the only advantage is really using one large drive instead of multiple drives like before which were limited to 2TB each so it's 6TB vs 7TB and just 1TB more but should the drive fail, there goes up to 7TB of recordings instead of just 2TB. I am sure you meant TB and not GB. As far as the 7TB max, it might depend on how the hardware calculates since the formatted capacity vs unformatted capacity are two different things and remember that storage manufacturers define each TB as 1000GB while hardware defines it as 1024GB. In my case, I have 3 drives on a powered Radio Shack USB 3.0 hub, 1 Western Digital 3.5" 2TB drive connected using this:
Amazon product ASIN B00EHDTRJ6 so it is powered and then have 2 x Western Digital 2.5" Passport Ultra drives which is non-powered:
Amazon product ASIN B00W8XXYSM
As of this morning, I disconnected the 3.5" drive and have 3 x Western Digital 2.5" Passport Ultra drives connected to the same hub non-powered.

In all instances, they are working fine.

 

[camillab]

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 found the same results with the 6TB working with a WD external drive, not finding a 7TB drive, which Dish had upgraded from their original limit of 2TB. How would you connect a 6TB to a 1 or 2TB drive? It would be nice for Dish to upgrade their Hoppers to at least an 8TB drive. Too bad the Hopper itself doesn't have a larger capacity. We often have to go through a routine to get it "unstuck", with the "other devices" thumbnail not appearing on the "recordings" tab along with the movies you've recorded. We go through a routine shown on the Fantom drive instructions, sometimes needing to do it a couple times for the thumbnail to again appear. Otherwise, you would have no access to movies put on the external drive! Scary!

 

[Josephinelcajon]

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

You cannot go wrong with a Western Digital Book. They work flawlessly and last forever. Not to mention priced reasonable.

 

[Josephinelcajon]

You cannot go wrong with a Western Digital Book. They work flawlessly and last forever. Not to mention priced reasonable.

 

[riderj]

You cannot go wrong with a Western Digital Book. They work flawlessly and last forever. Not to mention priced reasonable.

It has been mentioned in the past - is there any hope of naming each drive, rather than seeing "external drive 1"

 

[Josephinelcajon]

It has been mentioned in the past - is there any hope of naming each drive, rather than seeing "external drive 1"

I would love to see that ability to name each hard drive as well as folders within each drive. I am not aware they even have this on their to do list and with all hands just trying to become fully operational any and all improvements are certainly on the back burner. BUT if we don't keep mentioning it it will certainly never get done. My fear is these "kids" driving the future want EVERYTHING streaming off the cloud. I fear our government want the same thing.

 

[riderj]

I would love to see that ability to name each hard drive as well as folders within each drive. I am not aware they even have this on their to do list and with all hands just trying to become fully operational any and all improvements are certainly on the back burner. BUT if we don't keep mentioning it it will certainly never get done. My fear is these "kids" driving the future want EVERYTHING streaming off the cloud. I fear our government want the same thing.

Unfortunately, I concur.

 

[ethanlerma]

It has been mentioned in the past - is there any hope of naming each drive, rather than seeing "external drive 1" https://www.satelliteguys.us/xen/attachments/img_20230329_123551083-jpg.161360/

Ok Sir, you need a NAS in your life.

Then again, without a easy way to access said NAS with a Hopper defeats the point I guess.

 

[bookworm370]

** Warning long but researched post follows **

Believe it or not, it's not 7 terrabytes that's the limit, just easier for the public to understand. It's the total amount of formatted 'sectors' on all the attached drives. In doing some upgrades to one of my WD Books, I put in a 2 TB Seagate that formatted (according to Linux) at something like 1878 sectors. It would not connect to my existing 6TB surveillance hand cobbled drive in an enclosure. I then tried (just for grins because I had one laying around) a 2 TB Western Digital Blue drive which formatted to something like 1824 sectors.

As if by magic, my two drives (externally rated at 6TB and 2TB) both came online for 8TB'ish of storage. I said, naa, couldn't be so I tried it with a 2TB old Green drive and it came out to somewhere in between and, yup, it would not come online with the 6TB drive. So the one Blue I have (maybe it had some permanent errors which the factory just marked an entire track bad (internally) that makes it format out at a smaller sector number.

And along the above discussion, I found a 1.5TB WD Black drive, on eBay, and it, of course, comes online right away despite that 6TB + 1.5TB add up to more than 7! So 7 is for us technically challenged, at least according to DISH that we are all just dolts so whole numbers is easier for us to understand.

So now I have 3 drives. 6TB which is on all the time. 1.5TB and a 2TB drive. The only drawback is that, of course, one of them is plugged in while the other has it's switch on the hub turned off.

For those that just won't believe I can supply pictures of total bytes available that the hopper says and anyone can do the math that the two numbers add up to more then 7TB. And the 2TB drive by quite a lot!!

My guess is that the actually round number is about 7.4'ish TB's in available sectors, but it's all dependent on how the receiver formatted it to begin with. Partitioning doesn't help for squat as the receiver wipes out all partitioning and just adds X amount of 500Gig partitions until it fills up the drive at a 500 Gig times X level. And you can't have less than X fully allocated 500Gig partitions. The rest goes into the big disk bit bucket in the sky. So if there is any other space left over from (say) 10 partitions then that space doesn't count or used. So again, it's also the amount of even 500gig partitions it can fit on the drive, with the rest going to waste.

Trust me, this was a project that had me going downstairs to my bench, swapping drives out the WD enclosures and trying each one. I did find out that once you take about one of the Book enclosure WD just has a small module that plugs into the SATA and Power ports and you can just use that and the outer cables to quickly try out different drives. Just have to be careful to not jostle the drive while you are testing to make the little module fall off. A couple of rubber bands solved that!

So it's all about sectors and total amount of 500 gig partitions, not the external labeled capacity of the drives.

 

[ethanlerma]

Believe it or not, it's not 7 terrabytes that's the limit, just easier for the public to understand. It's the total amount of formatted 'sectors' on all the attached drives. In doing some upgrades to one of my WD Books, I put in a 2 TB Seagate that formatted (according to Linux) at something like 1878 sectors. It would not connect to my existing 6TB surveillance hand cobbled drive in an enclosure. I then tried (just for grins because I had one laying around) a 2 TB Western Digital Blue drive which formatted to something like 1824 sectors.

Are you sure on your numbers here? Could you be confusing sectors with something else? From what you are saying, your 2TB HDD's having ~1800 sectors would imply that each sector is about a GB in size, which is way off what a normal sector looks like (512B or 4KB). I just checked the sector count in one of my 4TB WD Red's and it came to 7814037168 sectors.

Still though, you are on to something interesting here. If sector size truly is the limit, it would theoretically be possible to use specialized drives like those used on servers with a larger capacity per sector, as long as the Hopper can read said formatting in the first place.

 

[bookworm370]

Yeah, I may have used the wrong word on sectors, I think it's the 1st one that says Total Disk Space. It's what shows up in Linux when you look at the properties table for the disk. Honestly, I'm more sure it has to do with how many 500G partitions it can fit on each individual HD. My two 2TB drives came out to two different 'Free Space' numbers when I went to try an EHD transfer even though they were both 2TB drives.

Another interesting thing that it does do, is that it fills the inner most partition (the highest number) first before it goes to the next one. In other words, from inner to outer. Probably to save on seek time.
I did do an experiment my transferring some shows from my DISHARC folder to different random partitions on the target drive. It did find all the shows no matter where I put them.

 

[Almighty1]

Are you sure on your numbers here? Could you be confusing sectors with something else? From what you are saying, your 2TB HDD's having ~1800 sectors would imply that each sector is about a GB in size, which is way off what a normal sector looks like (512B or 4KB). I just checked the sector count in one of my 4TB WD Red's and it came to 7814037168 sectors.

Still though, you are on to something interesting here. If sector size truly is the limit, it would theoretically be possible to use specialized drives like those used on servers with a larger capacity per sector, as long as the Hopper can read said formatting in the first place.

I think what he is trying to to say is not the sector size but I remember back when there was size limits recognize by OSes, the actual head count, cylinders which was printed on the label of HDDs or their specs would not show the correct capacity which was handled by something called LBA or Logical Block Addressing and each vendor can use a different number that when multiplied would get the correct results.
Logical block addressing - Wikipedia - This was applicable to EIDE or ATA but not SCSI/ESDI/MFM/RLL which are both the same technology except each manufacturer used a different name for the technology.