# Old to Dirctv, New to Dish



## Spanky_Partain (Dec 7, 2006)

Hello Dish Geeks,
Some of you may know me from the Directv side of the world.

Now I have moved out of the house and into a RV permanently. The RV has a Wineguard Dish 1000 and now it is time to switch, who wants to pay $1500 for another one of these type dish for Directv.

Can anyone verify that a Hooper will work with this type of satellite dish and be able to use all 5 tuners? The wineguard site says it supports 3 receivers, but I do not know if that is 3 tuners, 6 tuners, or what.

Wineguard says it will work with the hooper, but does not say that all five tuners will function.

Here is a link to the type of dish I have.

http://www.winegard.com/travler/travler-dish1000.php


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

I can't speak to the dish question... but a Hopper only has 3 satellite tuners. You can add 1 OTA tuner via the USB dongle to bring you to 4 total tuners in a Hopper.


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

Referring to super Joey add in coming maybe?


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## James Long (Apr 17, 2003)

I'm not sure about the dish, but the Hopper only has three tuners. One of the tuners is used to receive (up to) four of the local market TV stations (ABC, CBS, FOX and/or NBC) which allows the Hopper to watch or record up to six shows at one time. Or the third tuner can be used for a regular cable channel if not in use for the big four TV stations.

It looks like a standard DPP LNB ... so one should be able to connect a Hopper's node to two of the three outputs. Make sure you power down the Hopper before moving it. That would be the big drawback to using any DVR in a mobile environment ... they are designed for stationary use and storage. Hit a pothole and you could lose your hard drive. (DISH generally recommends non-DVRs for RV use.)


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

James Long said:


> Make sure you power down the Hopper before moving it. That would be the big drawback to using any DVR in a mobile environment ... they are designed for stationary use and storage. Hit a pothole and you could lose your hard drive. (DISH generally recommends non-DVRs for RV use.)


You know... I'm actually surprised no one has come up with some kind of contraption to assist with that. With all the RV-ers out there... if you could come up with some sort of semi-floating setup where you mount a DVR that allows it to move with the vibration and motion of the RV.... It might not be 100% foolproof, especially in the case of an accident OR sudden stop... but seems like something could be rigged up for most normal driving scenarios that would allow this.


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## Spanky_Partain (Dec 7, 2006)

Thanks for the replies. I thought the Hopper had 5 tuners. Looks like I may need to swap this dish with a Directv SWM system to handle the multiple tuner scenario.

Any one want to buy the Dish Wineguard?

It really is cool watching it setup automatically. Of course that is all I have ever watched on it.


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## Orion9 (Jan 31, 2011)

Stewart Vernon said:


> You know... I'm actually surprised no one has come up with some kind of contraption to assist with that. With all the RV-ers out there... if you could come up with some sort of semi-floating setup where you mount a DVR that allows it to move with the vibration and motion of the RV


I think to be effective, it would also be large, and space is at a premium in most RVs. Perhaps a better solution is sell an RV DVR with a 250GB or 500GB SSD. It would cost a hundred or a couple of hundred more than the plane rotating media DVR but wouldn't take up more space. (And that specialized RV contraption could easily end up costing over a hundred too.)


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

Orion9 said:


> I think to be effective, it would also be large, and space is at a premium in most RVs. Perhaps a better solution is sell an RV DVR with a 250GB or 500GB SSD. It would cost a hundred or a couple of hundred more than the plane rotating media DVR but wouldn't take up more space. (And that specialized RV contraption could easily end up costing over a hundred too.)


That was my other thought... wondering how long before DVRs start using SSD. I know that is expensive... so I guess it is a "race" to see what becomes cheap first... and probably the price in SSD will come down faster than a mechanical contraption that will see minimal use.


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## James Long (Apr 17, 2003)

DISH's recommendation to use a ViP 211k puts the hard drive outside of the receiver. It is a lot easier to shock mount an external drive for transit than an entire receiver. A DirecTV receiver with an external drive would have the same benefit.


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## TBoneit (Jul 27, 2006)

Stewart Vernon said:


> That was my other thought... wondering how long before DVRs start using SSD. I know that is expensive... so I guess it is a "race" to see what becomes cheap first... and probably the price in SSD will come down faster than a mechanical contraption that will see minimal use.


I do not ever expect to see a SSD in a DVR for more than one reason.

1. Right now a 1Tb SSD is almost $600. A Quick search in Google shows around $595 and $599.
2. the memory in a SSD drive has only so many writes to a memory location before it wears out and a DVR is always writing to the hard drive.

The $600 1Tb SSD uses memory that is less durable than the memory used in the older SSD drives to keep the price down. That would be a Samsung 840EVO vs a Samsung 840Pro.
Samsung warrants the 840EVo for three years except in the case of excessive writes.


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

Price shouldn't be an issue exactly to say "not ever" for SSD vs Hard Drives... because it wasn't so long ago that a 1TB Hard drive didn't exist... and the first ones were very expensive. Price of SSD will come down over time if it proves itself and is devoured by the masses.

Limited write-cycles is more of an issue, though... in a DVR that constantly buffers and would be constantly writing and erasing even when you aren't recording... But even that is only relevant when compared to the wear of a Hard drive over that same lifetime.

IF an SSD could last for 5 years, would you expect your traditional hard drive to last longer than that with the same continual use? A lot of people on the forum have experienced hard drive failures in their DVRs... so a case can be made that the "old" hard drive tech isn't lasting that long under heavy use either.


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## Orion9 (Jan 31, 2011)

As I search around, I find lots of statements that say, if you write 10GB to an SSD per day, it will last X years. However for X, I have seen values of 7, 18, 198 and over 200. I've also seen statements that these are manufacturers numbers, which seem to be conservative based on actual usage.

10GB per day would allow you to record 5-6 hours of TV each day for 7, 18, (or whatever) years. We watch 1-2 hours in a typical day and most people wouldn't be using an RV receiver anywhere near 365 days per year, so I think it's plausible. At lot of DVR hard disks seem to fail in well under 7 years.

I do think an SSD-based DVR might want to give users the option to turn off the live buffer. (Or perhaps keep the live buffer short and in RAM.)


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## Michael P (Oct 27, 2004)

Spanky_Partain said:


> Thanks for the replies. I thought the Hopper had 5 tuners. Looks like I may need to swap this dish with a Directv SWM system to handle the multiple tuner scenario.
> 
> Any one want to buy the Dish Wineguard?
> 
> It really is cool watching it setup automatically. Of course that is all I have ever watched on it.


What the Hopper has is the ability to tune to 4 different channels (has to be local network channels) simultaneously on one tuner plus 2 single channel tuners for a total of 6 simultaneous channels.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Stewart Vernon said:


> You know... I'm actually surprised no one has come up with some kind of contraption to assist with that. With all the RV-ers out there... if you could come up with some sort of semi-floating setup where you mount a DVR that allows it to move with the vibration and motion of the RV.... It might not be 100% foolproof, especially in the case of an accident OR sudden stop... but seems like something could be rigged up for most normal driving scenarios that would allow this.


The biggest snag of the foolproof configuration is almost certainly the availability of consistent AC power. Losing satellite signal when you park the antenna is a pain too.

I submit that you're missing a good part of the point of RV travel if you're watching TV while you're doing it.


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## flatus (Aug 18, 2006)

The Tech Report website has been running an experiment to see how long some typical consumer grade drives will actually last. An intro:
http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endurance-experiment

The latest update, in Feb, 2014: 
http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb


> By far the most telling takeaway thus far is the fact that all the drives have endured 600TB of writes without dying. That's an awful lot of data-well over 300GB per day for five years-and far more than typical PC users are ever likely to write to their drives. Even the most demanding power users would have a hard time pushing the endurance limits of these SSDs.
> 
> So far, the MLC drives have been exemplary. Their flash has suffered relatively few failures, and two drives remain completely unscathed. Our lone TLC offering continues to retire bad blocks at a steady pace, but the Samsung 840 Series still has plenty of flash in reserve. Apart from the unrecoverable errors we encountered after 300TB of writes, its performance has been solid overall.
> 
> At this rate, even the 840 Series may reach a petabyte of writes before burning out. The others are on track to cross that threshold easily, and I expect we'll be waiting a long time for their eventual demise. With that in mind, it might be a little while until our next update. We've already established that modern SSDs have more than enough endurance for typical consumer workloads, and at this point, we're just reporting more of the same. Besides, I'm fresh out of ideas for how to pose these things for pictures.


Apart from the cost, I think SSD's would do just fine in a dvr. I think dish should offer a 'premium' line of dvrs with SSds for people who are willing to pay for a silent drive for their bedroom or home theatre.


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