# Serious Hard Drive Error



## SAEMike (May 29, 2004)

Yesterday morning I tried to set a timer to record. When I set the timer, my 510 shut off and turned back on and went through the "acquiring satellite signal". When it got to Progress 3 of 5, a warning came on saying "Serious Hard Drive Error, please call Dish Network". The signal came back on and I pressed the DVR button and it said "Data not available". 

I shut the box off, then unplugged it, plugged it back in, and everything worked fine. 

Now that everything is working just fine, and has been since, is this something I should be concerned about (not too concerned because the box is still under warrantee) or do you think this was just a glitch?

Also, when I turned it back on, all my recordings were still in tact, they all worked (those I watched) and all my timers have fired just fine.


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## Bob Haller (Mar 24, 2002)

I would call E and immediately archive anything of value from that box. Its likely a hard drive about to go south, so try and avoid loosing anything of value....


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## boba (May 23, 2003)

My 501 did that, I did the same unplugged it and used it for another 5 months until I sold it. I've had TiVo from Directv for 13 months now and never had to reboot.


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## zman977 (Nov 9, 2003)

boba said:


> My 501 did that, I did the same unplugged it and used it for another 5 months until I sold it. I've had TiVo from Directv for 13 months now and never had to reboot.


We turned our TV on Sunday and the 501 kept going through transponders. Tried all the rebooting methods. Moved the receiver to the other TV and it still was giving us that error message. It started acting up a few weeks ago. At first all I had to do was unplug it from the wall, wait a few minutes, plug it back in and it would be fine for a day or two. Also, it started making a loud whining sound when it would power down. Now it dose not work at all. Just keeps saying "acquiring Satellite Signal" and going through transponders. Checked all the cables they were connected. So Dish is sending us a new 501. "should" be here in three to five business days. Unfortunately I didn't back anything up on tape when it started acting up so we lost about twenty five hours of programs. A lesson to be learned is if your DVR ever starts acting strange, back everything up.


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## Geronimo (Mar 23, 2002)

I have never seen that particular error but my 508 (essentially the same box) has been known to flake out and return after a reboot or switch check. I am not too terribly worried but I will follow the thread with interest.

Good luck on that vacation Mike---September is here already.


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## boba (May 23, 2003)

zman977 said:


> We turned our TV on Sunday and the 501 kept going through transponders. Tried all the rebooting methods. Moved the receiver to the other TV and it still was giving us that error message. It started acting up a few weeks ago. At first all I had to do was unplug it from the wall, wait a few minutes, plug it back in and it would be fine for a day or two. Also, it started making a loud whining sound when it would power down. Now it dose not work at all. Just keeps saying "acquiring Satellite Signal" and going through transponders. Checked all the cables they were connected. So Dish is sending us a new 501. "should" be here in three to five business days. Unfortunately I didn't back anything up on tape when it started acting up so we lost about twenty five hours of programs. A lesson to be learned is if your DVR ever starts acting strange, back everything up.


A better lesson to learn is don't archive on the HARD DRIVE it is for temporary storage.


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## garypen (Feb 1, 2004)

boba said:


> A better lesson to learn is don't archive on the HARD DRIVE it is for temporary storage.


On Dish DVR's perhaps. But, modern HDD's are perfectly capable of archiving data. After all, that is what ALL computers do. There is either something wrong with the way Dish DVR's communicate with their HDD's, causing premature failure, or Dish is purchasing B-stock from Maxtor.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

I'm not convinced that all these "Hard Drive Error"s are actually due to HDD hardware problems. E* software could very well be too stupid to figure out the difference between an I/O error and a data flaw due to bad software.


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## boba (May 23, 2003)

garypen said:


> On Dish DVR's perhaps. But, modern HDD's are perfectly capable of archiving data. After all, that is what ALL computers do. There is either something wrong with the way Dish DVR's communicate with their HDD's, causing premature failure, or Dish is purchasing B-stock from Maxtor.


Isn't it also recommended to back up your computer hard drive?


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## garypen (Feb 1, 2004)

SimpleSimon said:


> I'm not convinced that all these "Hard Drive Error"s are actually due to HDD hardware problems. E* software could very well be too stupid to figure out the difference between an I/O error and a data flaw due to bad software.


That's a very good point. The Dish DVR OS may not be able to deal with a bad sector, or some other odd behavior, in an otherwise healthy hdd.

That would not surprise me one bit. I really can't imagine that many Maxtors (and whatever other name-brand hdd's they use) going tits up like that. The odds are totally against it.


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## joebird (Sep 15, 2003)

I had a 508 give me this error once. It never was able to come back up correctly. They sent me a new (well, probably refurbished) one.


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## littleflurry (May 23, 2004)

Here is my arguement to dish:
"We pay $852.00 a year for dish network at $71.00 a month. So far we've paid close to $3408.00 since signing up with Dish network and changing over from Direct TV. Several days ago 8/30 our 501 receiver quit working and we lost all the programs saved on it. We are awaiting a new receiver to come to us in shipment. We were told we would receive a 9.20 credit??!! Nine dollars is ludicrous. Almost an insult. We pay, as many others Americans also pay, a large amount of our monthly salary to Dish Network. I love Dish Network but when this kind of service is what we receive, it makes me go looking at the other guys out there. Please look into this for us. Your equipment failed and we still are paying for part of programming we do not have. 

If a customer where I work, paid for a 40.00 part and he receives it 1 day late he receives 19.99 in shipping back. So we can keep him as a customer in the future."

zman's wife


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## Jacob S (Apr 14, 2002)

Perhaps if hard drives get cheap and small enough they will implement a backup feature to an additional hard drive where all content that is going to the first hard drive will also go to the second one.

I thought hard drives that failed were still able to have the data taken from it. Dish Network (or at least the hard drive manufacturer) should give that customer the data that was on that hard drive. A good solution is to put that data onto the new hard drive that you would receive.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

No argument from me (that your recorded shows should come back to you), but E* simply doesn't care. They haven't figured out that they are now a computer company, not a consumer company.


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## Guest (Sep 5, 2004)

SimpleSimon said:


> No argument from me (that your recorded shows should come back to you), but E* simply doesn't care. They haven't figured out that they are now a computer company, not a consumer company.


Quite the opposite Simon, Dish is well aware of exactly what they are and they are providing exactly the same level of hardware quality and support that low margin high volume computer manufacturers do.

Unfortunately for Dish customers, Dish's partnership with Microsoft (dishplayers) taught Dish how to release buggy software and they learned from the best.

IMO we will never see backups of HD data in DVRs. Now, a simple interface to allow us to do our own backups to PC is a great idea but I beleive Dish doesn't want the data easily transported of their platform and in a way I see their point.

We're still back at the original problem ... there is no reason a HD should die so quickly in a DVR when the same drives live years in PCs. It's common knowledge why they die and as long as hard drives are cheap that's the medium that will be used and we'll have to deal with it.


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## Jacob S (Apr 14, 2002)

Its amazing how hard drives of yester year (4 or 5 years ago) are still running in which were probably not made as well as the ones being made today which should handle even more and have a lot fewer failures and be more durable yet when they are in the Dish DVR's it seems as if they fail even more. Seems pretty odd to me. I never had a hard drive failure in any computer I have owned even the external ones I have travelled with.


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## garypen (Feb 1, 2004)

Most of this discussion would be moot if it were possible to swap drives in Dish DVR's like one can with DirecTivo boxes.


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## Guest (Sep 5, 2004)

Jacob S said:


> Its amazing how hard drives of yester year (4 or 5 years ago) are still running in which were probably not made as well as the ones being made today which should handle even more and have a lot fewer failures and be more durable yet when they are in the Dish DVR's it seems as if they fail even more. Seems pretty odd to me. I never had a hard drive failure in any computer I have owned even the external ones I have travelled with.


Jacob,

Are you basing this statement "which were probably not made as well as the ones being made today" on specific engineering knowledge, experience, or assumption?

Drives of "yesteryear" were made of better quality parts, more carefully assembled, and more thoroughly tested than any ATA-IDE drives sold today. When there was profit in hard drives manufacturers spent the money to shrink wrap reliable product. Now that we're in a "sell it at cost and make it up in volume business mentality" manufacturers simply can't afford to test it like before. Manufacturers are cutting every corner they can on the new drives and they are less reliable because of that. It is a concious decision by the manufacturers but the market pressures them into doing it.

You can't have a ZILLION GB hard drive for $99 and get quality and reliability too. The market made a choice and price is what matters. The market SCREAMS for cheap (read AFFORDABLE) hard drives and that's EXACTLY what we get CHEAP (read JUNK) drives.

I have customers with Netware 486 servers whose hard drives have been running 24/7 since the early 90s. My own personal CPU has been running 24/7 since 1995 with the same hard drive. Sure, it surprises the hell out of me too but it's true.

Another consideration ... the original IDE-ATA specification set a 540mb limit on drive storage. All drives exceeding that size are outside of spec and pushing the envelope regarding reliability. I recall begging to buy 540mb Conner drives for $300 apiece and now we can buy 120gb drives for pennies. IDE-ATA drives do not use an "intelligent controller" as SCSI drives do. IDE-ATA drives don't "defect map" anywhere near as competently as SCSI drives/controllers do.

One really EZ solution to DVR drive problems is to go to Adaptec and buy their 7880 controller chip. Drop that puppy on your DVR motherboard and run SCSI drives. In quantity the chips cost little but SCSI drives are more expensive than less reliable ATA drives. But remember, Dish will still have to solve the heat problems in chassis for any drive system and the DVR will cost you MORE money. But, you'd have a more reliable drive and higher (real world) transfer rates.

As for TIVO, even though we can "help ourselves" and change drives we'd still lose the data when the TIVO drive failed. It would be nice to be able to help ourselves though.


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Unh. Steve. I'm under the impression that the only real difference between a SCSI drive and an ATA/IDE drive is the electronics - not the HDA. And ATA has SMART, so it's not as dumb as it used to be. Also, the newer IDE specs (LBA, 133, etc) blew the 540MB limit off the paper years ago.


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## Mike Richardson (Jun 12, 2003)

There's been rumors about a Blu-Ray DVD burner add-on for the 921. If EchoStar could make a similar attachment for their SD PVRs, burning the MPEG-2 content to regular DVDs, that would rock.

The only problem is the MPAA/NAB/whoever crapping their pants because they think you'll start up a pirate shop burning movies off of HBO or something. To shut them up, you could, instead of creating standard DVDs to play in a DVD player, create proprietary DVDs that play on the receivers on your account. This should satisfy the MPAA/NAB/all those people, and you can still back up your shows. I think that would be a pretty good tradeoff. I have stuff that's a year old on my 501. Even though I've recorded it to tape, I still don't want to erase it because the tape isn't as good quality. If I could instead buy a little "EchoDisc" add-on to my 501, I could burn those shows to the proprietary format, and watch them again later. I would be happy with that. In the future I could still convert them to tape, say if I was dumping Echostar.

Or another solution, might be to, burn standard DVDs, but encode your account information into the DVD, so if you are running pirate shop, and one of your customers is caught, they can link it to you.


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## Guest (Sep 6, 2004)

for your consideration ...



SimpleSimon said:


> Unh. Steve. I'm under the impression that the only real difference between a SCSI drive and an ATA/IDE drive is the electronics - not the HDA.


SCSI drives are mainly used in servers and VERY high end workstations and there is more difference in SCSI vs ATA than "impressions" infer. SCSI drives use higher quality board level and moving components and are more thoroughly tested. Most SCSI drives still carry a 5 year warranty while every ATA drive I've seen lately has retreated from 3 year warranties back to a one year warranty. Doesn't that tell us something?

Pop open a spankin' new $20k Compaq or IBM server and see if there's ATA drives in it. Can you say SCSI. I don't know about the Dell Servers and don't care.

Data transfer rate: SCSI is synchronous (read & write at the same time for you novices), ATA is not (asynchronous)



SimpleSimon said:


> And ATA has SMART, so it's not as dumb as it used to be. Also, the newer IDE specs (LBA, 133, etc) blew the 540MB limit off the paper years ago.


SMART is not *intelligent*. SCSI is intelligent and "not as dumb as it used to be" is hardly a ringing endorsement for ATA in my book.

"Blew the 540mb limit" was simply a change in ATA-IDE sector TRANSLATION it did NOT change the original engineering spec. That original engineering spec was mutilated to achieve more size in MB but AFAIK never "changed". One has ALWAYS been able to install a SCSI drive of ANY size in any (Apple, UNIX, Linux, Netware, OS/2, AS400, DEC Alpha, Silicon Graphics,et al) box under ANY OS and not have to "translate" to the motherboard BIOS (or run software such as Drive Rocket to do so) because the INTELLIGENT SCSI controller does.

With respect Simon, drive spec information is readily available for every brand and model. You can even find the "engineering specs" for ATA and SCSI if you go to ANSI or maybe just a Google search.

So tell me Simon, which drive lasted longer for you, that old Maxtor SCSI 8760 cinder block or that new rippin' fast $99 ATA drive?


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

Well, Steve, I was trying to be polite about it, but your thinking any given single-arm HDA is capable of simultaneous reading and writing tells me that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

As for standards, we've gone through at least 4 major changes in the ATA/IDE specs. Most each time, maximum theoretical speed, drive size, and controller "intelligence" was improved.

Your statements about translation software are straight out of the '90s and no longer relevant.

As for overall reliability of new drives vs. old, I've seen no real differences. Of course, there's no way for any of us to know whether the warranty changes have to do with the actual hardware, or a desire to minimize contingent liability on the corporate books. 

As for warranties, I just ran a quick check (all listed are ATA):
300GB: 1yr: 1, 3yr: 2 (all were Maxtor)
250GB: 1yr: 3, 3yr: 9 (3 Maxtor, 3 Hitachi, 6 WD)
200GB: 1yr: 4, 3yr: 4, 5yr: 3 (the 5yr were all Seagate)
I stopped there because the larger capacities are going to be the most recent drives.
I guess you've not seen every drive lately,  considering the majority still carry 3+ years of warranty.

I tried to find large-capacity SCSI drives, but all I could find were 147GB AT 500 frelling dollars !!! I can buy a LOT of capacity and RAID them for that kinda scratch. In all fairness they all did have 5 year warranties, but c'mon, even the extra speed just ain't worth it except in high-load servers.

Finally, there's no way to know how long my cheap ATA drives are gonna last, but they've been going strong for 3-6 years (depending on which system) now.


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## Guest (Sep 6, 2004)

SimpleSimon said:


> Well, Steve, I was trying to be polite about it, but your thinking any given single-arm HDA is capable of simultaneous reading and writing tells me that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
> 
> Your statements about translation software are straight out of the '90s and no longer relevant.


Hey, this old dangerous guy likes living in the 90s!
The translation is now being done in the BIOS.
I mis-spoke on read/wright ... I meant command cueing SCSI vs ATA.

Here's an interesting read for you ...
http://www.acc.umu.se/~sagge/scsi_ide/

We can continue to disagree but the bandwidth is better used to stay on point.

:lol:Some people only open their CPUs to change hard drives.:lol:


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## SimpleSimon (Jan 15, 2004)

SteveS said:


> Hey, this old dangerous guy likes living in the 90s!
> The translation is now being done in the BIOS.
> I mis-spoke on read/wright ... I meant command cueing SCSI vs ATA.
> 
> ...


I think you mean "command *que*ueing". Aside: I was a beta tester on the first storage controllers that had command queuing and built-in cache. This was probably a decade or so before SCSI thought about doing it (SCSI-2). I made a lot of money doing storage systems performance analysis in those days.  One thing to note is that caching and queuing at the device level is not always the best way to git-r-done.  We found that queuing one level above that was generally better. In a PC that would probably be in the South Bridge, but I'm not sure.

Note that ATA-2 (1996) is when the 540MB limit went away, and SMART followed in 1997. While there may still be translation routines in the BIOS, I seriously doubt that modern device drivers use any of the BIOS routines any more - that's why there's manufacturer-specific drivers out there. 

Bottom-line, yes SCSI holds an edge in raw performance, but is much more expensive. The metric generally used to make a business decision is "price/performance", and unless you MUST have that last dribble of speed, SCSI loses every time.

BTW, That's a fine link you posted (even though it's 6 years old ) - I bookmarked it for future use - thanks! 

P.S. I open my system unit to change my CPU, RAM, etc. Opening a PC's CPU is not a good thing to do if you ever expect to use it again.


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## littleflurry (May 23, 2004)

littleflurry said:


> Here is my arguement to dish:
> "We pay $852.00 a year for dish network at $71.00 a month. So far we've paid close to $3408.00 since signing up with Dish network and changing over from Direct TV. Several days ago 8/30 our 501 receiver quit working and we lost all the programs saved on it. We are awaiting a new receiver to come to us in shipment. We were told we would receive a 9.20 credit??!! Nine dollars is ludicrous. Almost an insult. We pay, as many others Americans also pay, a large amount of our monthly salary to Dish Network. I love Dish Network but when this kind of service is what we receive, it makes me go looking at the other guys out there. Please look into this for us. Your equipment failed and we still are paying for part of programming we do not have.
> 
> If a customer where I work, paid for a 40.00 part and he receives it 1 day late he receives 19.99 in shipping back. So we can keep him as a customer in the future."
> ...


New receiver came in a box that looks like it was dropped from a 3rd story window and it doesn't work either but we are getting free Starz for a month and 9.20. Woopee. I want my other TV back.


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## BurgEnder (Aug 15, 2003)

SteveS said:


> ... there is no reason a HD should die so quickly in a DVR when the same drives live years in PCs. .


 I can think of one real good reason-ventilation. PCs tend to be riddled with cooling fans these days. Mine(home built) has a total of eight if you include the ones on the northbridge, the cpu, and the video card. A DVR is normally placed either atop an already hot CRT-based television or in some component rack on top of or below another heat producing component. A PC is also more likely to be plugged into a surge protector than a DVR is.


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