# New external PVR hard drives



## Pete38 (Oct 24, 2002)

Maxtor has announced new external hard drives for PVRs.

Articles here:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1573769,00.asp

http://www6.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20040427_145720.html

Note that the external drives connect to the PVR via either IEEE1394 (Firewire) or serial ATA. Thanks Dish...

Pete


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## Chris Freeland (Mar 24, 2002)

Pete38 said:


> Maxtor has announced new external hard drives for PVRs.
> 
> Articles here:
> 
> ...


Will these drives be formatted for all satellite and standalone DVR's or just Tivo?


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

No connection to Dish announced.


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## maddawg (Jan 25, 2003)

Highly unlikely dish would allow this to be added to their pvrs. There is currently no easy way to add a hd to 501s.


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## MrAkai (Aug 10, 2002)

The hardware is there if Dish were only willing. (See external HD connector on back of 5xx's)


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## garypen (Feb 1, 2004)

Is that a serial port?


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## David_Levin (Apr 22, 2002)

I'm not sure why we would need a 'special' hard drive to do this. The 921 firewire port should have worked with any firewire hard drive (with the proper software).

Echostar seems to have no interest in this type of expansion (though they make a lot of nonsense excuses). Don't know why, it would be a great selling point. People are all ready adding hard drives to the HD Tivo.


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## maddawg (Jan 25, 2003)

Yes, but have fun if dish activates the port. Dish is not know to be progressive with their hardware.


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## Randy_B (Apr 23, 2002)

I believe the USB port on the 5xx series is active. v1.2, and very limited in the equipment it will work with. I can't imagine that it would be difficult to upgrade this port to v2.0 and accomodate one of the external drives. Of course MPAA, et al would have a cow!


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## David_Levin (Apr 22, 2002)

Did I miss something. There's no USB port on the classic E* 5xx boxes. The new (Linux) 721, 522 and 921 have USB. The 721 USB can be connected to a keyboard.



> I can't imagine that it would be difficult to upgrade this port to v2.0 and accomodate one of the external drives. Of course MPAA, et al would have a cow!


1.2 vs 2.0 is generally a hardware thing. If the ports are 1.2, they are not gonna turn into 2.0.

Yes, the MPAA will have a cow. Tuff, E* can put the data on the drive encrypted (as the 721 already does, probably 522 and 921 too).


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## MrAkai (Aug 10, 2002)

The port on the 501/508/510 series is like a DB-25 port but it labeled like "AIDE" so the theory has always been (as was shown in early software releases which had some manner of external HD menu option) that it was a modified IDE port for an external HD.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Not "AIDE", but "E*IDE". I never saw any hints for external HD in old menu.


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## MikeSoltis (Aug 1, 2003)

So if the Tivo box stores 30 hrs on 250 GB, these 160 GB drives would add almost 20 hrs. I would probably be pleased with 50 hrs of HD storage.

What would this do to a 6208, I wonder. It has an 80 GB drive, but seems to be able to store somewhere around 6-8 hours of HD material (a guess).

I know the 6208 my parents have will only buffer 20 mins of HD, and is kind of flaky in that:
It will continue to buffer what is on the selected channel "underneath" while you are watching a recorded program.
If the recorded program and channel "underneath" are both HD, the HD playback is fine, until you try to rewind or ff, then you have problems.


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## Pete38 (Oct 24, 2002)

Hi all,

Below is a link to another article posted today on the external PVR discussion. It has more in-depth info, but a lot of it appears to be speculation:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1574363,00.asp

Pete


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## David_Levin (Apr 22, 2002)

Pete,

Thanks for the link. It's good that the hard drive vendors are pushing for this.

Hopefully, they are right and Scientific Atlanta will do this. Then, there will be pressure on the others to support external storage as well.


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