I wonder if that “chipset limitation” was only for the internal drives?
Somehow, I doubt that. There must be a reason why the Wally was capped at 4TB, so I think that at least for some receivers, there is still a chipset limitation. Specifically, I could see Dish justifying capping the Hopper EHD's at 2TB due to chipset limitations of the
ViP DVR's, and needing to ensure compatibility. In other words, in the early days of the Hopper, it is quite possible that a customer might upgrade to a Hopper, fill up an EHD with a bunch of stuff, and then decide that they really don't like the Hopper very well, so they downgrade back to a ViP DVR. Even to this day, that scenario may still play out if the Hopper dies, and the customer happens to still have a purchased ViP DVR laying around, so they temporarily switch back to the ViP DVR while they are waiting for the replacement Hopper. Imagine if Dish had supported much larger EHD's for the Hopper, and then the customer hooks it up to the ViP DVR, only to find that most of their recordings are inaccessible, or that they cannot actually play anything at all. That customer would probably be pretty ticked-off, and justifiably so. With that scenario becoming more and more rare these days, though, perhaps it was finally time to ignore the ViP compatibility issue, and go ahead and roll out the larger EHD support for the Hoppers.