# 3TB and 4TB Drives. The Danger!



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

So, now it's common knowledge that the 34s can use 3TB & 4TB drives. My question is, what happens if the 34 fails and you have close to 3TBs of content stored on it? At the moment, you lose it!

Once again I ask for some support in our seemingly never ending quest to have D* authorize _any HR within an account to read the HDDs recorded by any HR within that account_.

Seems like a logical step forward, doesn't it? Seemed like it years ago when I started my first thread on this subject, too. Logic doesn't seem to have much of an impact on D*.

Now, things have changed. The 34s are on the scene and others of that ilk will follow. Some of the members are already running 3TB externals. Personally, I wouldn't do it because of the "marriage" of HR to its HDD. Bad enough to lose 2TBs of content. Can't imagine the frustration of losing much more content than that.

What can we do except raise our voices to D* and get this changed? If this thread gets enough support, perhaps D* will finally do the right thing. This is more important (I think) than DLBs or even the HD GUI.

I was offered a 34 without charge a couple weeks ago. The CSR could not believe that I wouldn't take it. When I explained to him what happens when an HR, any HR, goes bad, he understood my reasoning.

What do YOU think? Please give this some thought, it can't be that difficult to do. And it should be done with every HR, not just the 34s, I think.

Rich


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

I did support a request for the feature from beginning. 

It just show how dish is taking advantage of the feature for last few years starting from ViP622.


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

Rich said:


> I was offered a 34 without charge a couple weeks ago. The CSR could not believe that I wouldn't take it. When I explained to him what happens when an HR, any HR, goes bad, he understood my reasoning.


I think you missed out on a good deal. You have large drives already on your dual tuner DVRs, so I don't really see any difference.
Having 5 tuners isn't going to change the reliability and for me, is a big plus over having them spread across twin HR24s.
Sure I have everything in "one pot" over two, now but the trade-off is I don't have two chances of failure either. 
Yes if my 34 fails, I'm hosed. 
At the same time, I've had good luck since I got my first HR20 and haven't had a failure with any of mine since.


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## Carl Spock (Sep 3, 2004)

This whole matter is exactly why I won't use an external drive, or rely on any DirecTV DVR for archival storage. If I could marry a drive with any DVR on my account, and back up that drive, that would be another matter.

I view the hard drives in my DVRs as carrying the impermanence of flowers in the spring.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Rich, ask mods how to add a poll - it's possible for the thread. And I would slightly change the title - adding a keyword "RFI" - a request to implement the feature (account 'marriage') for DTV SW Dept.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

P Smith said:


> I did support a request for the feature from beginning.
> 
> It just show how dish is taking advantage of the feature for last few years starting from ViP622.


Every time this has come up, I've been told there weren't enough people using the eSATA function for this change to be authorized by D*. I dealt with it my way and have ensured that, barring a catastrophe, I won't lose any recordings. Now with the 34s and whatever follows, surely more folks will want to put much larger HDDs on them. I think the time has come for a change. I know Dish has this feature, it can't be that hard to do.

How can we force their hand? Don't accept a 34 until this change is authorized for all HRs. I won't accept one. Not that I don't want one, but I'm kinda tired of having 12 HRs just so I can back up everything I value several times.

Rich


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## hdtvfan0001 (Jul 28, 2004)

I've had 4 polls and 5 threads on the topic of archiving since 2009. 

While the ability to archive content so that it doesn't get "lost" during an HD DVR failure has been a long-standing desire by many people, there has been little movement in that direction. It's also one of the very few disappoints I've had with DirecTV service.

The alignment of one hard drive to one device, as opposed to being able to migrate storage at the account level (instead of the hardware level) is the main impediment.


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## usnret (Jan 16, 2009)

Hopefully, if they change it we would be able to run the external HD on any DVR that we have on account vice just 34 to 34, etc.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

veryoldschool said:


> I think you missed out on a good deal. You have large drives already on your dual tuner DVRs, so I don't really see any difference.


The deal is still there. That's not gonna change, they want me to reup and I'm not gonna do it until something changes drastically.



> Having 5 tuners isn't going to change the reliability and for me, is a big plus over having them spread across twin HR24s.


And I've already got 24 tuners, don't really need any more, but I would like to "lighten the load".



> Sure I have everything in "one pot" over two, now but the trade-off is I don't have two chances of failure either.
> Yes if my 34 fails, I'm hosed.
> At the same time, I've had good luck since I got my first HR20 and haven't had a failure with any of mine since.


I don't really think we should factor your experiences into this. I think you know more about this stuff than anyone on the forum does and you can deal with whatever happens in a way that most of us can't. In other words, if anyone's an "anomaly", you are, and that's a good thing for us. There's a vast difference between knowing what you know and what the average user knows.

Rich


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

hdtvfan0001 said:


> I've had 4 polls and 5 threads on the topic of archiving since 2009.
> 
> While the ability to archive content so that it doesn't get "lost" during an HD DVR failure has been a long-standing desire by many people, there has been little movement in that direction. It's also one of the very few disappoints I've had with DirecTV service.
> 
> The alignment of one hard drive to one device, as opposed to being able to migrate storage at the account level (instead of the hardware level) is the main impediment.


I don't want to archive anything, I just want to be able to use the large HDDs on another HR within my account if an HR fails. My 20-700s are failing now and I've got four left with a 2TB on/in all of them. I already know I'm gonna lose all that content sooner or later.

Yup, we need a divorce lawyer to dissolve the "marriage" between the HR and its attendant hard drives.

Rich


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

Rich said:


> In other words, if anyone's an "anomaly", you are
> 
> Rich


Nobody has EVER accused me of being "normal". :lol:

I'm not against your idea.

I'm just trying to look at this:

What's the highest failure component?
Isn't this the drive?

Cloning a drive or going to RAID would seem to be what would help this.

With larger drive supported, RAID would seem to be the option to use.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

veryoldschool said:


> Nobody has EVER accused me of being "normal". :lol:


Don't think anyone on this forum would ever consider you normal. I certainly don't.... :lol:



> I'm not against your idea.
> 
> I'm just trying to look at this:
> 
> ...


Not in my case. I've only lost a couple HDDs and I think blaming the HDDs is way overblown. I've had far more trouble with the HRs than the HDDs.



> Cloning a drive or going to RAID would seem to be what would help this.
> 
> With larger drive supported, RAID would seem to be the option to use.


True, but that gets expensive. Two 3TB drives in one RAID enclosure would cost a lot. And as we both know money's kinda tight these days. I wouldn't spring for that. I did have two RAID setups running years ago and they both failed. One lasted 3 or 4 months and the other one ran for about a year and failed. Both RAID boxes cost me ~ $500.

Rich


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

Rich said:


> Don't think anyone on this forum would ever consider you normal. I certainly don't.... :lol:
> 
> Rich


And someone with 12 DVRs just to not miss anything, is perfectly "normal"? [I kid]

I don't know what is in the works. There was "some buzz" about this subject but nothing that suggested what or when.

The move to supporting drives larger than 2TB is something wanted for a long time.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Rich said:


> That's what I'm afraid of, limiting the ability to just the 34s and whatever comes next. I'm not sure I'd support doing this and including the 20s, which are old and, at least in my case, failing and I think I'd also exclude the 21 series, thereby limiting it to the 24s and whatever follows the 34s. That should make it even easier for D* to do. Or would it? I don't know. Just a thought.
> 
> Rich


No, that would be bad limitation.Please do not push the idea.

Make it simple: moving an EHD in one account should include all compatible DVRs.


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## Drucifer (Feb 12, 2009)

Rich said:


> So, now it's common knowledge that the 34s can use 3TB & 4TB drives. My question is, what happens if the 34 fails and you have close to 3TBs of content stored on it? At the moment, you lose it! . . . .


We need a DirecTV Cloud.


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## usnret (Jan 16, 2009)

Genie would then "feed" the cloud and mess that up too


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## Carl Spock (Sep 3, 2004)

Drucifer said:


> We need a DirecTV Cloud.


Let's do some "back of the envelope" calculations here.

Of the 20 million subscribers, let's say half are HD and have a DVR, or 10 million. Let's assume half of those just have one DVR and no external storage and would need no more than 500 GB back-up, which would mean they would need a total of 2.5 million TB of back-up. That takes care of half the customers for HD back-up on the DirecTV Cloud.

Of the other half, or 5 million customers, let's guess that half of those have two DVRs and again no external HD hooked up to their DVRs. They'd need a TB each to cover their two DVRs, or 5 million TB of back-up total.

We still have 2.5 million customers left. Let's say 1.5 million of those have some kind of external HD on their DVR(s) but are otherwise nomal users. We'll need 2 TB on average in the cloud to back them up. Add another 3 million TB to the total.

Finally, we are left with 1 million power users. They have either a lot of DVRs, a large amount of external HDs, or both. Let's give them 4 TB of back-up each, or a total of 4 million TB more.

That means DirecTV just needs to provide 14.5 million TB of back-up on the cloud to cover everyone. :eek2:

No problem.


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## Drucifer (Feb 12, 2009)

Carl Spock said:


> Let's do some "back of the envelope" calculations here.
> 
> Of the 20 million subscribers, let's say half are HD and have a DVR, or 10 million. Let's assume half of those just have one DVR and no external storage and would need no more than 500 GB back-up, which would mean they would need a total of 2.5 million TB of back-up. That takes care of half the customers for HD back-up on the DirecTV Cloud.
> 
> ...


I don't think they need to store the same show over and over again for all their customer. I'm pretty sure just one will do.


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## Carl Spock (Sep 3, 2004)

Drucifer, I think you missed the point.


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## Shades228 (Mar 18, 2008)

Rich said:


> Every time this has come up, I've been told there weren't enough people using the eSATA function for this change to be authorized by D*. I dealt with it my way and have ensured that, barring a catastrophe, I won't lose any recordings. Now with the 34s and whatever follows, surely more folks will want to put much larger HDDs on them. I think the time has come for a change. I know Dish has this feature, it can't be that hard to do.
> 
> How can we force their hand? Don't accept a 34 until this change is authorized for all HRs. I won't accept one. Not that I don't want one, but I'm kinda tired of having 12 HRs just so I can back up everything I value several times.
> 
> Rich


I'm guessing the amount of money you have spent on receiver fees, hard drives, and other parts of your setup you could have easily bought the box sets or blu rays of the movies you really want to keep.

Plus your logic is self defeating. If you continue to pay more money to get the same functionality then how does it hurt a company?

I would never use this feature but I could see how some might.


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

veryoldschool said:


> Nobody has EVER accused me of being "normal". :lol:
> 
> I'm not against your idea.
> 
> ...


RAID is definitely the way to go to combat drive loss, and that's why I went RAID 5. However that's all null and void if the 34 itself fails. I realize that when a DVR fails the majority of the time it's because the hard drive failed but it would be nice if recordings were tied to accounts and not devices should the device fail for a reason other than drive failure.


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## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

I don't know about the cloud aspect, I just think that would be problematic. All we really need is the ability to plug an external drive into any DVR on the same account, and everything starts where it left off, all recordings accessible. And with no fee.

Seems much less complex.


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

Drucifer said:


> We need a DirecTV Cloud.


No, we really don't need to go to the "cloud" fad.


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

Drucifer said:


> I don't think they need to store the same show over and over again for all their customer. I'm pretty sure just one will do.


That's where you're wrong. At a minimum they'd have to have 1 copy of every show from every demographic. Can't cut out the local guys!

Then they'd need 1 copy of every movie from every movie channel. Can't just have 1 copy of "Cowboys & Aliens" from HBO, you'd have to have it from Cinemax, Showtime, etc.

You just can't do what Apple is doing with Match for TV shows and movies.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

while you guys joyful dragging the thread off-topic, it would be reasonable to ask the sat providers (dtv, dish, etc) for a few kilobytes of account's storage to series, times, etc what many is redo manually after each quirk with a box


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## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

P Smith said:


> while you guys joyful dragging the thread off-topic, it would be reasonable to ask the sat providers (dtv, dish, etc) for a few kilobytes of account's storage to series, times, etc what many is redo manually after each quirk with a box


Now that cloud storage I'd be happy with.


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## Davenlr (Sep 16, 2006)

dpeters11 said:


> Now that cloud storage I'd be happy with.


I really see no reason why, if we can sendreport to DirecTv, we couldnt also SendSettings.... Just stupid they havent implemented such a simple addition that even AOL had 10 years ago.


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## gimp (Jul 29, 2006)

I agree completely. As a long time D* DVR user with large external drives (currently 2TB) I can't count the number of times I've lost nearly full drive contents due to either bad DVR replacements or upgrades (the most recent being the HR34 upgrade). I don't know what's worse, loss of content or effort to recreate Series Recording list. Now that I've got 99 series recordings, the next DVR replacement will most certainly be a chore. Last upgrade I got a little smarter though and took pictures of the old list before kissing goodbye!



Rich said:


> So, now it's common knowledge that the 34s can use 3TB & 4TB drives. My question is, what happens if the 34 fails and you have close to 3TBs of content stored on it? At the moment, you lose it!
> 
> Once again I ask for some support in our seemingly never ending quest to have D* authorize _any HR within an account to read the HDDs recorded by any HR within that account_.
> 
> ...


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## Diana C (Mar 30, 2007)

I hate to bring up the "t-word" but TiVo allowed you to move a recording from one DVR to another. I used that several times when one DVR's drive starting getting funky. It allowed me to save a few key recordings, and then replace the drive.

I fully support the idea of locking a DVR's recordings to the account, not the individual receiver. And it doesn't matter how small a percentage of users make use of the feature. I can't imagine it is any more complicated than changing the source for the unique encryption key from the receiver's ID number to the account number. If it takes a programmer more than half a day to make the code change they need better programmers.

By the way, if we could replace DVRs and keep our recordings, people might be more likely to upgrade to newer equipment, getting DirecTV more customers under commitment.


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## docderwood (Oct 27, 2006)

FWIW.....

They can create Nomad, linked to our account. 

It seems logical to me that they could create a way to allow us to not lose everything when our DVR dies. 

I understand the RAID external concept, but this is added expense and still doesn't fully protect you from the hassle of a DVR failure.


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

Rich said:


> Every time this has come up, I've been told there weren't enough people using the eSATA function for this change to be authorized by D*. I dealt with it my way and have ensured that, barring a catastrophe, I won't lose any recordings. Now with the 34s and whatever follows, surely more folks will want to put much larger HDDs on them. I think the time has come for a change. I know Dish has this feature, it can't be that hard to do.
> 
> How can we force their hand? Don't accept a 34 until this change is authorized for all HRs. I won't accept one. Not that I don't want one, but I'm kinda tired of having 12 HRs just so I can back up everything I value several times.
> 
> Rich


Do you record mostly series, or lots of movies as well, or more of a mix?


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

Rich said:


> That's what I'm afraid of, limiting the ability to just the 34s and whatever comes next. I'm not sure I'd support doing this and including the 20s, which are old and, at least in my case, failing and I think I'd also exclude the 21 series, thereby limiting it to the 24s and whatever follows the 34s. That should make it even easier for D* to do. Or would it? I don't know. Just a thought.
> 
> Rich


I would actually think that if there where to be any line drawn in the sand, it would be the hr34 and newer, simply because they appear to be the only receivers so far that can deal with larger hard drives. If that not a concern, then I would like to dream that it would work with any unit.


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

RunnerFL said:


> No, we really don't need to go to the "cloud" fad.


I agree.. But then again, we kind of had cloud storage already for some stations. On demand, for example with HBO, has everything. If all the channels went the same route as HBO then we would have cloud storage in a way that I think most people would be ok with. Its just that on demand now, except for HBO, is extremely lacking...


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

inkahauts said:


> I agree.. But then again, we kind of had cloud storage already for some stations. On demand, for example with HBO, has everything. If all the channels went the same route as HBO then we would have cloud storage in a way that I think most people would be ok with. Its just that on demand now, except for HBO, is extremely lacking...


Cinemax also has all their series and a ton of movies as well, like MaxGo.


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## hdtvfan0001 (Jul 28, 2004)

docderwood said:


> FWIW.....
> 
> They can create Nomad, linked to our account.
> 
> ...


Yup...that is indeed true.

In fact nomad would be one of several ways to support archiving. It comes down to locking down copy protection within the framework of a storage device - the logical path would be to assign storage based upon an account number, not a specific HD DVR RID as it's done today. There are no technical barriers to doing it.


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## rbpeirce (Feb 24, 2006)

RAID's no good if you can't transfer it to another DVR. I don't use any external HD for the same reason.

If the HD was transferrable I would use it and I think many other people would as well. My greatest fear is having a lot, or almost any, stuff to watch and having the unit fail with no chance of recovery.

What would be cool to me is a DVR with a transferrable, external HD and no internal HD. Then RAID (or backup) would become interesting.


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## CCarncross (Jul 19, 2005)

HDD failures are probably by far the most common failures. If you are using an external HDD, then if you suspect that the drive is beginning to fail, you just copy it to a new drive, and voila, back in business. To me, that is currently one of the best reasons to be using an external HDD, along with all the extra space you have.


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## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

True, but having had a fan failure in an HR34, I still want more support before taking that plunge.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

veryoldschool said:


> And someone with 12 DVRs just to not miss anything, is perfectly "normal"? [I kid]
> 
> I don't know what is in the works. There was "some buzz" about this subject but nothing that suggested what or when.
> 
> The move to supporting drives larger than 2TB is something wanted for a long time.


Supporting larger drives is fine with me, all I want is the ability to play those drives on any HR within my account. Seems so simple, why the delay? It's been well over 5 years since we started asking for this.

Rich


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

P Smith said:


> No, that would be bad limitation.Please do not push the idea.
> 
> Make it simple: moving an EHD in one account should include all compatible DVRs.


Yeah, I guess you're right. Just throwing some ideas out there.

Rich


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

veryoldschool said:


> Having 5 tuners isn't going to change the reliability and for me, is a big plus over having them spread across twin HR24s.


Don't you suppose that thrashing the hard drive with "up to" five streams isn't considerably more stressful (mechanically) than two? I'm thinking in terms of exponential increases.


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

harsh said:


> Don't you suppose that thrashing the hard drive with "up to" five streams isn't considerably more stressful (mechanically) than two? I'm thinking in terms of exponential increases.


Technically that would be 6 in and 3 out, but I kind of doubt the increase is going to cause any significant change. Just the act of writing/reading may be the failure mode.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

docderwood said:


> They can create Nomad, linked to our account.


Would you sit still for a DVR that was as reliable as a nomad setup?

There is very clear precedent for a system that works so I suspect that it is a business decision that they haven't made the feature widely available already. One wonders if Echostar has a patent on the feature.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

veryoldschool said:


> Technically that would be 6 in and 3 out, but I kind of doubt the increase is going to cause any significant change. Just the act of writing/reading may be the failure mode.


I hadn't contemplated with idea of doing trick play with clients while all the recordings were in progress. With a few streams, it shouldn't be doing a lot of seeking, but with "up to" nine, I would imagine some of the noisier drives are protesting audibly.

Buffering works well for recording linear content but it doesn't work all that well for non-linear playback.


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## TBoneit (Jul 27, 2006)

Rich said:


> Supporting larger drives is fine with me, all I want is the ability to play those drives on any HR within my account. Seems so simple, why the delay? It's been well over 5 years since we started asking for this.
> 
> Rich


OK, I'll tell you my speculation as to why it won't happen or What DirecTV won't tell you :lol:

1. Dishes implementation is simpler as they only store video on the external drive.
2. All the external drives in use now are encrypted and tied to the individual DVR.
3. That tying to a specific DVR means that to go to a whole house key so that any External will work on any DVR in the house would mean wiping any External drive now in use. Can you imagine the backlash if everybody had their external drives wiped or the content rendered useless?

I can think of one scenario that would work and the programming might be tricky. Have the DVR detect that the video is tied to a specific unit for playback on old titles and any new titles stored on the drive use a whole house key. Plus that would lead to complaints that some of my videos don't play and others do.

Or slow down the HR series converting the encryption, if possible, to a whole house key.

That's off the top of my head.

Good Luck with your endeavor Rich
Roger


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

"harsh" said:


> ... wonders if Echostar has a patent on the feature.


No they don't.


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## rbpeirce (Feb 24, 2006)

CCarncross said:


> HDD failures are probably by far the most common failures. If you are using an external HDD, then if you suspect that the drive is beginning to fail, you just copy it to a new drive, and voila, back in business. To me, that is currently one of the best reasons to be using an external HDD, along with all the extra space you have.


How do you copy it? Can it be mounted as a drive on your computer and if so will your computer recognize it? I don't know how these things are formatted but I know they are encrypted in some way.

This still leaves the problem of a DVR failure. Unless the HD can be made recognizable by another DVR anything on the HD is gone.

My favorite solution would still be a RAID system and receivers you can plug into. Actually, if you cold plug into any receiver on your account you could have a form of whole home, sort of like carrying a flash drive from one computer to another.


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

rbpeirce said:


> How do you copy it? Can it be mounted as a drive on your computer and if so will your computer recognize it? I don't know how these things are formatted but I know they are encrypted in some way.


http://www.dbstalk.com/showpost.php?p=1940174&postcount=1

Pretty simple actually.


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## rbpeirce (Feb 24, 2006)

Easy for you to say. It looks like you need to be running Linux. I'm not. I am running OS X. Any instruction pages for that?


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## Getteau (Dec 20, 2007)

P Smith said:


> while you guys joyful dragging the thread off-topic, it would be reasonable to ask the sat providers (dtv, dish, etc) for a few kilobytes of account's storage to series, times, etc what many is redo manually after each quirk with a box


+10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

As someone who just lost an HR24-500 because of a bad hard drive, this is the biggest PITA of the process. While I didn't like losing my recordings, especially for old series that don't come on any longer, having to go back in and rebuild my series list and favorite lists was a major chore.

On the plus side, at least the caller ID in my HR24-100 works better than the HR24-500


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## MrLatte (Aug 19, 2007)

rbpeirce said:


> Easy for you to say. It looks like you need to be running Linux. I'm not. I am running OS X. Any instruction pages for that?


Yes, you download the Mac OS X version and make a bootable GParted Live CD version 0.3.7-7. Don't use the current release - if you look in that thread you'll see people have problems using anything newer than about 0.4.x.x - can't remember exactly how new it still works.

I haven't tried this myself but I read the thread getting ready.


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

rbpeirce said:


> Easy for you to say. It looks like you need to be running Linux. I'm not. I am running OS X. Any instruction pages for that?


You don't need to be running Linux. You just need the gparted live disk and a machine you can put the drives into.


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## rbpeirce (Feb 24, 2006)

As I read the information about GParted I wonder if the same thing could be accomplished on an OS X machine using Disk Utility and various Unix tools. Does anybody know?

What does xfrestore do and might there be a similar Unix program? I recall there was a dump, and I believe, restore in older Unix releases but neither appear to exist in the 10.8.2 release of OS X. Could cpio or dd be used?

This may be relatively straight-forward, but I know nothing about Linux and how it relates to Unix and OS X.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

rbpeirce said:


> As I read the information about GParted I wonder if the same thing could be accomplished on an OS X machine using Disk Utility and various Unix tools. Does anybody know?
> 
> What does xfrestore do and might there be a similar Unix program? I recall there was a dump, and I believe, restore in older Unix releases but neither appear to exist in the 10.8.2 release of OS X. Could cpio or dd be used?
> 
> This may be relatively straight-forward, but I know nothing about Linux and how it relates to Unix and OS X.


YOU should really have a respect to the thread's starter and do not continue drag offtopic. 
You got right thread's URL to discuss the matter, so please continue there.
:backtotop:


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## makaiguy (Sep 24, 2007)

TBoneit said:


> OK, I'll tell you my speculation as to why it won't happen or What DirecTV won't tell you :lol:
> ...
> 3. That tying to a specific DVR means that to go to a whole house key so that any External will work on any DVR in the house would mean wiping any External drive now in use. Can you imagine the backlash if everybody had their external drives wiped or the content rendered useless?


Nah, in the same programming update that starts it encoding with an account code instead of a unit code, you have the playback check to see if it was recorded with EITHER code. Couldn't take but one or two lines of code. What is lacking is the willingness to do it.


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

rbpeirce said:


> As I read the information about GParted I wonder if the same thing could be accomplished on an OS X machine using Disk Utility and various Unix tools. Does anybody know?
> 
> What does xfrestore do and might there be a similar Unix program? I recall there was a dump, and I believe, restore in older Unix releases but neither appear to exist in the 10.8.2 release of OS X. Could cpio or dd be used?
> 
> This may be relatively straight-forward, but I know nothing about Linux and how it relates to Unix and OS X.


Nothing can be done using OSX because OSX does not have any XFS tools. You need to use the xfsdump/xfsrestore method.

FYI, OSX is BSD which is a variant of Linux.


----------



## BAHitman (Oct 24, 2007)

This is a feature I would like to see...

My experience since my first HR...

1 upgraded 2TB drive died... (replaced and lost all content)

1 CE Download erased all content on 1 DVR (2TB FULL drive)

1 HR20-700 died (Internal drive)(DVR lost tuner 2) replaced with HR21  

1 750GB drive died in my HR34 (I put 4 OLD 750's in my RAID5 enclosure)... replaced the drive and kept on going as if nothing was wrong... 

so, If I could get another RAID enclosure, i might just load it up with 4 3TB or 4TB drives. and IF I could move the existing to another DVR that would be great... but there is another issue to code for...

move a drive from HR34 to HR2x what would happen with SL 51+? not to mention the Genie "space"


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

RunnerFL said:


> RAID is definitely the way to go to combat drive loss, and that's why I went RAID 5.


The best way to reduce wear and tear on a drive is to have it turned off. That's why being able to copy content to a drive for archiving is cool.


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

BAHitman said:


> move a drive from HR34 to HR2x what would happen with SL 51+? not to mention the Genie "space"


The Genie space would stay with the hard drive and be used for PPV stuff like the HR2X's do now with DirecTV's partition. I don't think they'd be able to allow moving a drive from an HR34 to say an HR24 due to compatibility issues. One being the amount of SL's and the other being the 2TB limitation on the HR2X's that the HR34's no longer have.


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

harsh said:


> The best way to reduce wear and tear on a drive is to have it turned off. That's why being able to copy content to a drive for archiving is cool.


Huh? What does that have to do with what you quoted me saying??


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

TBoneit said:


> 1. Dishes implementation is simpler as they only store video on the external drive.


I'm not sure how DIRECTV's version would be different. You would need the drive to be external to move it to a different unit.


> 2. All the external drives in use now are encrypted and tied to the individual DVR.


That's how DISH's EHD solution started.


> 3. That tying to a specific DVR means that to go to a whole house key so that any External will work on any DVR in the house would mean wiping any External drive now in use.


If they can play the content with WHDS, they've already demonstrated the ability to use a foreign key.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

RunnerFL said:


> Huh? What does that have to do with what you quoted me saying??


You asserted (in the quoted text) that RAID is the best way to combat loss. I countered that not having the drive(s) running 24/7 is a better method to combat loss. Archiving to a live drive is not really archiving.

You need to be specific about what kind of RAID you're talking about because half the RAID modes actually put you in a weakest link situation.


----------



## BAHitman (Oct 24, 2007)

harsh said:


> WHDS, they've already demonstrated the ability to use a foreign key.


Not necessarily... it could be a key exchange, or it could be that the source decrypts the video, then puts it in an encrypted transport stream to the target...


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

harsh said:


> You asserted (in the quoted text) that RAID is the best way to combat loss.


And it is...



harsh said:


> I countered that not having the drive(s) running 24/7 is a better method to combat loss.


That's like saying not driving a car is the best way to not put miles on it. What a silly statement for you to make, not surprised really. You KNOW DVR's run 24/7, how would you expect them to not have a drive running in a DVR?



harsh said:


> Archiving to a live drive is not really archiving.


I said nothing about archiving a live drive.



harsh said:


> You need to be specific about what kind of RAID you're talking about because half the RAID modes actually put you in a weakest link situation.


If you had read what you quoted from me you would see that I clearly stated what RAID mode I was using.


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

BAHitman said:


> it could be that the source decrypts the video, then puts it in an encrypted transport stream to the target...


This.


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

Shades228 said:


> I'm guessing the amount of money you have spent on receiver fees, hard drives, and other parts of your setup you could have easily bought the box sets or blu rays of the movies you really want to keep.


That's what I do if I want to archive something. Haven't done it for quite a while. Yeah, I spent a good bit of money buying my own owned HRs (6), but at the time I was sick of getting replacements that didn't work. I solved that problem by buying my own replacements. The money I spent on the 2TB HDDs wasn't wasted, they migrate from failed HR to good HR without any problems and all I really use them for is backing up recordings.



> Plus your logic is self defeating. If you continue to pay more money to get the same functionality then how does it hurt a company?


I'm not trying to "hurt" D*. Where did you get that idea from?



> I would never use this feature but I could see how some might.


Use what feature, I don't understand that question?

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

dpeters11 said:


> I don't know about the cloud aspect, I just think that would be problematic. All we really need is the ability to plug an external drive into any DVR on the same account, and everything starts where it left off, all recordings accessible. And with no fee.
> 
> Seems much less complex.


Seems so simple, doesn't it?

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

inkahauts said:


> Do you record mostly series, or lots of movies as well, or more of a mix?


Our system allows us to record a series in its entirety. For programs such as _24_, which had a very complex story line and multiple characters, the only way we/I could keep up with it was to watch the whole year's series one after the other in a wonderful week. Shows that don't have complex story lines, such as _L&O: SVU_ we watch and delete immediately.

I've got two seasons of _Hawaii Five O_ and _Bluebloods_ stored up. I don't like either show and my wife is never gonna watch all of them, but she likes them and I have plenty of room for them. Also have to factor my son's shows into the whole thing and my granddaughter's shows.

I do have a lot of movies stored up.

The real kicker here is: I, personally, do not watch much D* content except for football games (Giants and Jets) and, of course, the Yankees. I prefer NetFlix to D*.

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

inkahauts said:


> I would actually think that if there where to be any line drawn in the sand, it would be the hr34 and newer, simply because they appear to be the only receivers so far that can deal with larger hard drives. If that not a concern, then I would like to dream that it would work with any unit.


Be nice and logical, wouldn't it?

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

inkahauts said:


> I agree.. But then again, we kind of had cloud storage already for some stations. On demand, for example with HBO, has everything. If all the channels went the same route as HBO then we would have cloud storage in a way that I think most people would be ok with. Its just that on demand now, except for HBO, is extremely lacking...


I should have mentioned that I have the Premier movie package only because of the scripted shows. I really enjoy them and record them in their entirety. I don't think you can get the HBO shows on VOD if you don't subscribe to HBO. Don't know how it works with other channels.

I've had a lot of instances of audio not being properly aligned with the video while watching VOD shows lately.

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

CCarncross said:


> HDD failures are probably by far the most common failures. If you are using an external HDD, then if you suspect that the drive is beginning to fail, you just copy it to a new drive, and voila, back in business. To me, that is currently one of the best reasons to be using an external HDD, along with all the extra space you have.


We don't disagree often, but I gotta disagree with you here. I have had very few HDD failures since '06. I have had one internal drive fail (a Seagate Cuda 1.5) and a couple external HDDs. I've had many, many HRs fail for reasons other than the HDDs.

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

TBoneit said:


> OK, I'll tell you my speculation as to why it won't happen or What DirecTV won't tell you :lol:
> 
> 1. Dishes implementation is simpler as they only store video on the external drive.
> 2. All the external drives in use now are encrypted and tied to the individual DVR.
> ...


Huh. Sounds more complicated than I thought.

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

makaiguy said:


> Nah, in the same programming update that starts it encoding with an account code instead of a unit code, you have the playback check to see if it was recorded with EITHER code. Couldn't take but one or two lines of code. What is lacking is the willingness to do it.


That makes me feel better.

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

RunnerFL said:


> Nothing can be done using OSX because OSX does not have any XFS tools. You need to use the xfsdump/xfsrestore method.
> 
> FYI, OSX is BSD which is a variant of Linux.


Hear that "whooshing" noise? That's the sound of your post going right over my head.... :lol:

Rich


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

Rich said:


> Hear that "whooshing" noise? That's the sound of your post going right over my head.... :lol:
> 
> Rich


You're probably not alone.


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

RunnerFL said:


> You're probably not alone.


Sometimes I feel so ignorant. I could have paid more attention to computers, I was into them in the beginning, but never had the urge or the time to learn more about them. Too late now...:nono2:

Rich


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

Rich said:


> Sometimes I feel so ignorant. I could have paid more attention to computers, I was into them in the beginning, but never had the urge or the time to learn more about them. Too late now...:nono2:
> 
> Rich


It's never too late. I learn something new every day.


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

RunnerFL said:


> It's never too late. I learn something new every day.


Me too, but I've got a lot of catching up to do just to understand some posts.

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

Please don't forget the topic of this thread is about the problems associated with using 3TB or 4TB drives and having the HR go south. I know how easy it is to go off topic, I do it all the time, but I think this is really important and we should deal with the main topic. Not trying to moderate, just a reminder. 

Rich


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## Diana C (Mar 30, 2007)

RunnerFL said:


> Nothing can be done using OSX because OSX does not have any XFS tools. You need to use the xfsdump/xfsrestore method.
> 
> FYI, OSX is BSD which is a variant of Linux.





Rich said:


> Hear that "whooshing" noise? That's the sound of your post going right over my head.... :lol:
> 
> Rich


Rich....you should duck about now. :lol:

Actually, OSX is a descendant of NeXT, which was derived from Unix and borrowed a few things from BSD Unix. BSD is another derivative of Unix that has evolved quite a bit since it's "mating" to NeXT and MacOS. Linux is yet a third derivative of Unix.

All 3 operating systems have a common root, Unix, but evolved along different paths.

Edit: One other thing....most of the networking layer in Microsoft Windows was adapted from BSD.


----------



## Herdfan (Mar 18, 2006)

Rich said:


> Every time this has come up, I've been told there weren't enough people using the eSATA function for this change to be authorized by D*.


Because everyone knows how flaky the externals can be so they just replaced the internals and the TOS be damned. :eek2:

I didn't say that out loud did I?


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

Titan25 said:


> Actually, OSX is a descendant of NeXT, which was derived from Unix and borrowed a few things from BSD Unix.


Which is like saying a Peanut Butter & Jelly sandwich has no grapes involved. Since NeXT comes from BSD and OSX comes from NeXT that means OSX comes from BSD. And by "borrowed a few things" you mean the core of everything it does, then yes they "borrowed a few things". I just cut out the middle man to avoid straying too far off topic with long drawn out posts on trying to copy content from one drive to another using OSX.

Now as for the topic....

It's clear that the technology is out there that will allow sharing drives between DVRs, now it's just a matter of convincing DirecTV that they need to allow this.


----------



## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

"Herdfan" said:


> Because everyone knows how flaky the externals can be so they just replaced the internals and the TOS be damned. :eek2:
> 
> I didn't say that out loud did I?


I doubt more the .001 % of people have esata drives connected, and less than half that who would actualy consider opening up and replacing the internal drvie.


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

Herdfan said:


> Because everyone knows how flaky the externals can be so they just replaced the internals and the TOS be damned. :eek2:
> 
> I didn't say that out loud did I?


You're probably pretty close to being absolutely correct unfortunately. I don't agree with externals being flaky though. I haven't had any issues with an eSATA device on a DirecTV DVR.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

inkahauts said:


> I doubt more the .001 % of people have esata drives connected, and less than half that who would actualy consider opening up and replacing the internal drvie.


20000000 customer / 100000 = 200 DVRs
is that what you mean ?


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

Titan25 said:


> Rich....you should duck about now. :lol:
> 
> Actually, OSX is a descendant of NeXT, which was derived from Unix and borrowed a few things from BSD Unix. BSD is another derivative of Unix that has evolved quite a bit since it's "mating" to NeXT and MacOS. Linux is yet a third derivative of Unix.
> 
> ...


Wow! Thanx for the warning... :lol:

Rich


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## hdtvfan0001 (Jul 28, 2004)

It's to the point we might need breadcrumbs to find out way home on this discussion.


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## Herdfan (Mar 18, 2006)

RunnerFL said:


> You're probably pretty close to being absolutely correct unfortunately. I don't agree with externals being flaky though. I haven't had any issues with an eSATA device on a DirecTV DVR.


I don't necessarily mean DirecTV's implementation of eSATA, but instead external drives having issues. I have had several and every single one of them has had issues. Now the issue on my MX-1's was simply the fan would get dusty and need to be cleaned, but still walking into a room and hearing your hard drive making noise is a bit unsettling.

My internals run much better.

And I would guess there are more than 200 here on this board who have changed internals.


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## dennisj00 (Sep 27, 2007)

Somehow we expect a $39 enclosure with a $99 drive to be reliable 24x7 for several years on a port that's unsupported with a 12" cable!!


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## Davenlr (Sep 16, 2006)

dennisj00 said:


> Somehow we expect a $39 enclosure with a $99 drive to be reliable 24x7 for several years on a port that's unsupported with a 12" cable!!


Going on 3 yrs now...not a single issue yet


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

dennisj00 said:


> Somehow we expect a $39 enclosure with a $99 drive to be reliable 24x7 for several years on a port that's unsupported with a 12" cable!!


Why shouldn't we? They are the exact same drives, or in some cases better, that are inside and the same cables...


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

Davenlr said:


> Going on 3 yrs now...not a single issue yet


I've got one that's right around that area too.


----------



## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

P Smith said:


> 20000000 customer / 100000 = 200 DVRs
> is that what you mean ?


Yeah, I doubt that even 500 people have ever opened up a hrx to install a larger hard drive.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

If only one Rich did 60, then your number is not correct for sure.


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## hdtvfan0001 (Jul 28, 2004)

inkahauts said:


> Yeah, I doubt that even 500 people have ever opened up a hrx to install a larger hard drive.


Does doing about 15 by one person count somehow? 

As for the topic at hand...I'm still trying to comprehend any "danger"... :shrug:

I "get" all the other stuff.


----------



## Herdfan (Mar 18, 2006)

hdtvfan0001 said:


> As for the topic at hand...I'm still trying to comprehend any "danger"... :shrug:


I guess the "danger" is the possibility of losing your recordings. And while I would not want to, it is not the as a big of issue as it used to be. When DVR's came and I had a TiVo Series 1, if you lost a drive or something didn't record, you were SOL until it that episode came back as a rerun.

Today, it is not the issue it was because you can always watch it online or buy it from iTunes. But still I don't want to lose everything.

One thing you have here, and the providers have help people buy into it with larger and larger hard drives, is that we now use DRV's for archiving as much as time-shifting. There are some shows that get watched later the same day or within the week. There are others that will stack up and get watched say over Thanksgiving week when no new shows are on.

If we did nothing but time-shift within a week time period, we would not need 1T drives. Wouldn't need 500GB drives. But the providers included them to entice customers into thinking they can keep 100/200/500 hours of content.

At that point, I think they have a responsibility to do all they can to allow the customer to save their content should there be a box failure. Now they can't do anything about drive failure, but they can about other types of receiver failures.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Titan25 said:


> BSD is another derivative of Unix that has evolved quite a bit since it's "mating" to NeXT and MacOS.


BSD doesn't really exist anymore aside from a handful of spin-offs. Berkeley turned the project off in 1995 after an 18 year run.


> Edit: One other thing....most of the networking layer in Microsoft Windows was adapted from BSD.


Adaptation is a practice that Microsoft doesn't typically employ. See more at "unauthorized borrowing".

The original NT stack was based on a stack from Spider Systems that was a BSD derivative. Microsoft subsequently came into possession of a new "from scratch" winsock stack that was distributed in NT3.5 and Windows 95. The reason the copyright notice is still in there has to do with the fact that some of the ancillary programs from the Spider incarnation that aren't part of the transport layer were never rewritten (ftp, rcp, rsh).

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/19/05641/7357


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

inkahauts said:


> I doubt more the .001 % of people have esata drives connected, and less than half that who would actualy consider opening up and replacing the internal drvie.


That's the wall we hit every time we start a thread such as this. If people understood the benefits of an external drive, I think they'd go for it.

My wife was at a business dinner recently and someone brought up D*. After a bit of listening, she told the table about the system we have and, while several people had D*, they had no idea what MRV was. That surprised me. It's not like D* didn't advertise it when it was introduced. People just seem to tune out what they don't understand. My point being, if folks don't know about a fully supported function, one that was widely advertised, how are they gonna know and understand an unsupported and unadvertised function such as the eSATA function?

Not that I want to see D* go into the external drive business. I like the freedom to choose my HDDs myself. And my external devices.

Kind of a quandary, no?

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

Herdfan said:


> I don't necessarily mean DirecTV's implementation of eSATA, but instead external drives having issues. I have had several and every single one of them has had issues. Now the issue on my MX-1's was simply the fan would get dusty and need to be cleaned, but still walking into a room and hearing your hard drive making noise is a bit unsettling.
> 
> My internals run much better.
> 
> And I would guess there are more than 200 here on this board who have changed internals.


The externals seem to have problems with the external devices, not the HDDs in them. I don't know how many "bad" FAPs and Xtremes I threw away before I tried ripping the HDD out of them and putting it in another external device. And the HDDs worked. It was mostly the external devices that caused my problems. They're cheap and you get what you pay for. I have had less trouble with the Thermaltake docking stations than any other external device I've tried.

I've got eight HRs that I own and have a 2TB HDD in all of them. They just run better with a large HDD internally.

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

RunnerFL said:


> Why shouldn't we? They are the exact same drives, or in some cases better, that are inside and the same cables...


The enclosures are the weak link in the chain. I've had many failures.

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

P Smith said:


> If only one Rich did 60, then your number is not correct for sure.


You must have misread my post. I've got about 60 HRs documented by D*. I never opened that many up. I don't know how many of my owned HRs have been opened and had a large HDD installed in them over the years. I'd guess I've opened about 20 or 30. I have to keep external drives on my leased HRs so I can keep track of what's leased and what's owned. Every time an owned HR fails I take the HDD out and put it in it's replacement. I have no real idea how many times I've done this. Four times in the last two months.

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

hdtvfan0001 said:


> Does doing about 15 by one person count somehow?
> 
> As for the topic at hand...I'm still trying to comprehend any "danger"... :shrug:
> 
> I "get" all the other stuff.


Perhaps "danger" was a bit strong. But you noticed it!... :lol:

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

Herdfan said:


> I guess the "danger" is the possibility of losing your recordings. And while I would not want to, it is not the as a big of issue as it used to be. When DVR's came and I had a TiVo Series 1, if you lost a drive or something didn't record, you were SOL until it that episode came back as a rerun.


That's what I was thinking when I used that word. No real DANGER. Just a word to catch your attention.



> Today, it is not the issue it was because you can always watch it online or buy it from iTunes. But still I don't want to lose everything.


I've got that covered, but it cost me. I'd hate to lose, say, 3.5TBs of recordings just because an HR failed. If the HDD failed, I'd understand that, but the massive amounts of recordings some folks put on their HRs and have the HR go south are surely losses that are felt by those folks.



> One thing you have here, and the providers have help people buy into it with larger and larger hard drives, is that we now use DRV's for archiving as much as time-shifting. There are some shows that get watched later the same day or within the week. There are others that will stack up and get watched say over Thanksgiving week when no new shows are on.


I can actually archive recordings. If I put the same show on five or six HRs, what are the odds of all of them failing? But I don't. I like to keep my HDDs partly empty, they seem to run much better that way. There's really nothing out there that I want to archive.



> At that point, I think they have a responsibility to do all they can to allow the customer to save their content should there be a box failure. Now they can't do anything about drive failure, but they can about other types of receiver failures.


And that's the point of this thread.

Rich


----------



## hdtvfan0001 (Jul 28, 2004)

Rich said:


> Perhaps "danger" was a bit strong. But you noticed it!... :lol:


Yup....but this would have worked too...










Danger...danger....danger....


----------



## Diana C (Mar 30, 2007)

Rich said:


> That's the wall we hit every time we start a thread such as this. If people understood the benefits of an external drive, I think they'd go for it.
> 
> My wife was at a business dinner recently and someone brought up D*. After a bit of listening, she told the table about the system we have and, while several people had D*, they had no idea what MRV was. That surprised me. It's not like D* didn't advertise it when it was introduced. People just seem to tune out what they don't understand. My point being, if folks don't know about a fully supported function, one that was widely advertised, how are they gonna know and understand an unsupported and unadvertised function such as the eSATA function?
> 
> ...


That's an interesting story. I had always assumed that the lack of interest in external drives was caused by MRV...why attach another drive when (for roughly the same price) you can have another DVR instead of a basic receiver in the bedroom, double your disk space, gain an extra couple of recording tuners and still watch where you want. If people aren't using MRV, I don't know how they manage the limited diskspace, particularly on the HR20 and HR21 models.


----------



## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Rich said:


> I'd guess I've opened about 20 or 30. I have to keep external drives on my leased HRs so I can keep track of what's leased and what's owned. Every time an owned HR fails I take the HDD out and put it in it's replacement. I have no real idea how many times I've done this. Four times in the last two months.


In all (or at least most) of these cases, it was the receiver that failed and not the hard drive?


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

Titan25 said:


> That's an interesting story. I had always assumed that the lack of interest in external drives was caused by MRV...why attach another drive when (for roughly the same price) you can have another DVR instead of a basic receiver in the bedroom, double your disk space, gain an extra couple of recording tuners and still watch where you want. If people aren't using MRV, I don't know how they manage the limited diskspace, particularly on the HR20 and HR21 models.


No, the lack of interest in externals goes much farther back than MRV. We've been asking for the ability to have all HDDs recorded within an account read by any HR within the same account for years. I've been time shifting since the mid '80s and I had twelve VCRs running off cable receivers before I made the shift to D* and discovered DVRs. That was back when all the DVRs only recorded SD shows. As soon as the HRs came out and I discovered the eSATA function, I started putting externals on all my HRs.

I've always wondered how someone with a stock HDD in a 20 or 21 coped. Guess they just make do. So many families with kids and both parents working and just not enough time to watch TV, perhaps? I dunno.

Rich


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

harsh said:


> In all (or at least most) of these cases, it was the receiver that failed and not the hard drive?


Yup. I really haven't had much trouble with HDDs. With my Tivos, it seemed like I was constantly changing HDDs. Refreshing change, the HRs have been.

Of course, every eSATA (all-in-one devices) that failed for quite a while was thought to have a bad HDD. We proved to my satisfaction that the external devices were the problem, not the HDD. In most cases.

I can only remember one internal HDD that failed.

When you get the blue screen that says your storage device is shot, that doesn't always mean the external HDD is bad, it's usually the external device not the HDD.

Rich


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

Rich said:


> The enclosures are the weak link in the chain. I've had many failures.
> 
> Rich


True, but I was mostly focused on his flame of $99 HDDs and cheap cables.

The only enclosure I've had fail was my original Free Agent Pro when we first got eSATA. That wasn't the enclosure even, it was the power supply.


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

RunnerFL said:


> True, but I was mostly focused on his flame of $99 HDDs and cheap cables.
> 
> The only enclosure I've had fail was my original Free Agent Pro when we first got eSATA. That wasn't the enclosure even, it was the power supply.


Did you think of ripping the HDD out of the enclosure? Took me a while to figure that out. Also took me a while to figure out how to get the HDD out of that enclosure. The Xtremes were even harder, they didn't want to let go of those HDDs.... :lol:

Cheap cables? I use them all the time and they work well.

$99 HDDs? Those same HDDs used to cost ~ $300 and I haven't seen that $99 price since the floods. The last HDD I bought before the floods cost me $69 for a 2TB EARS. Last one I bought recently cost me $128. Same model and size.

Rich


----------



## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

Rich said:


> Did you think of ripping the HDD out of the enclosure? Took me a while to figure that out. Also took me a while to figure out how to get the HDD out of that enclosure. The Xtremes were even harder, they didn't want to let go of those HDDs.... :lol:


Oh, when it failed I pulled the drive out and put it in another enclosure and had no problems. Shortly thereafter I swapped that drive (750G) for 1TB using the xfsdump/xfsrestore method.



Rich said:


> Cheap cables? I use them all the time and they work well.


Same here. They are the same quality as the cables inside the DVRs so I'm not sure why someone would think those cables would be worse than what's inside. *shrug*



Rich said:


> $99 HDDs? Those same HDDs used to cost ~ $300 and I haven't seen that $99 price since the floods. The last HDD I bought before the floods cost me $69 for a 2TB EARS. Last one I bought recently cost me $128. Same model and size.


I can't really comment on price, I get my drives at cost. However prices have come back down and stock has caught back up. Newegg had 2TB drives last week for $99. Those $99 drives are of the same, or better, quality so again not sure why someone would think the drives we buy would be worse.


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## JonW (Dec 21, 2006)

I think it saves DirecTv a ton of money. Because all your recordings are locked away and tied to a specific DVR, the last thing you ever want to do is upgrade that DVR, or swap it out. You can't just swap DVRs or even service, you have to run the old side by side with the new until you've watched enough of your backlog to let it go.

If you've been archiving shows, you're just out of luck.


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## Shades228 (Mar 18, 2008)

The fact is there isn't a demand because your average consumer just doesn't need it. If HD storage space was a primary driver of consumers needs for a DVR then cable companies would have increased their HD years ago.

This board is full of power users and even here only a small % use them. I'd be interested to see what % of DISH subs use this feature and it has everything that people here are asking for. I still bet it's a small % of DVR users that have the ability to do so.


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## Bill Broderick (Aug 25, 2006)

JonW said:


> I think it saves DirecTv a ton of money. Because all your recordings are locked away and tied to a specific DVR, the last thing you ever want to do is upgrade that DVR, or swap it out.


That's an interesting point. I'm going through that right now. I've been debating an upgrade to an HR-34, but didn't want to deal with losing the programming that I already have. Recently, I did a system test on my HR-20, and it's telling me that I have a hard drive problem and that I should call DirecTV.

Because it looks like I may need to replace my HR-20 anyway, now I'm back thinking about getting an HR-34. I'm actively trying to watch everything that's already recorded on the HR-20 and am shifting as many of the "season passes" that are currently on the HR-20 off to my other DVR's, so that when I finally do upgrade, I'm not going to lose anything that I care about.


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## Shades228 (Mar 18, 2008)

JonW said:


> I think it saves DirecTv a ton of money. Because all your recordings are locked away and tied to a specific DVR, the last thing you ever want to do is upgrade that DVR, or swap it out. You can't just swap DVRs or even service, you have to run the old side by side with the new until you've watched enough of your backlog to let it go.
> 
> If you've been archiving shows, you're just out of luck.


Perhaps you can explain the savings? If a customer orders another receiver and then pays the additional TV fee on it until they're done watching it then they would make money.



Bill Broderick said:


> That's an interesting point. I'm going through that right now. I've been debating an upgrade to an HR-34, but didn't want to deal with losing the programming that I already have. Recently, I did a system test on my HR-20, and it's telling me that I have a hard drive problem and that I should call DirecTV.
> 
> Because it looks like I may need to replace my HR-20 anyway, now I'm back thinking about getting an HR-34. I'm actively trying to watch everything that's already recorded on the HR-20 and am shifting as many of the "season passes" that are currently on the HR-20 off to my other DVR's, so that when I finally do upgrade, I'm not going to lose anything that I care about.


If you ordered the HR34 and had it installed how long would it take you to watch the stuff on there? 3 months of an additional TV fee is $18.


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

Darn it! I just screwed up my post... :lol:


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## hdtvfan0001 (Jul 28, 2004)

inkahauts said:


> Lets put it this way, *my mom is a danger to electronics when she's is dusting them*, so yeah, there is a danger in people opening up the units... :lol:


Now that is just plain.... !rolling

Mrs HDTVFan must have some of the same DNA in terms of that trait. :lol:


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

I just don't thin the majority of people understand the concept of recording everything and watching latter, much less the need for more space if they are coming from cable where they had maybe 20 hours of recording space an snow have four or five times that.

People often don't get these concepts unless they. Are explained to them in a store or in their home by someone else who gets it.


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

Shades228 said:


> The fact is there isn't a demand because your average consumer just doesn't need it. If HD storage space was a primary driver of consumers needs for a DVR then cable companies would have increased their HD years ago.
> 
> This board is full of power users and even here only a small % use them. I'd be interested to see what % of DISH subs use this feature and it has everything that people here are asking for. I still bet it's a small % of DVR users that have the ability to do so.


Since we are talking about low consumer demand, why did the 2GB limit get removed for the HR34? If the logic is that DTV never does something unless there is a lot of demand then that change would never have been made. I've never met a Product Manager yet that was in favor of spending any time/money on upgrading core technology just to stay current with technology trends.

It sure wasn't done to make the few external storage geeks happy since it's not supported at all.

That means that larger internal storage is coming - because there is demand for it. It's a *duh* moment for a device marketed as a "Home Media Server".

The gist of this thread, whether internal or external storage, is that as the capacity rises people will be utilizing it and the reaction to a device failure is going to be hotter.

I'm sure the average consumer has not a care in the world about RAID storage either. They don't even have a clue that such a thing is available. But I would be surprised if any consumer was happy about a DTV DVR failure! If they were aware that technology existed that prevented loss from a drive failure they would WANT IT. Likewise if they knew their programming could be easily transferred if the box died, they would WANT IT. Neither of these is difficult.

What is a moderate irritation today is going to be a whole world of hurt when an "average consumer" finds out that >2TB of programming for their entire household is GONE.

It's just lame that a "Home Media Server" was even brought to market without both of these issues being addressed. It should have had at least 2 (RAID1) "storage cartridges" (ie consumer removable disk magazines). If Joe Consumer (and Joe Installer) can handle inserting and removing CDs and DVDs they can sure handle a disk cartridge. I can recall my 5-year-old son swapping Nintendo cartridges!

The obvious solution now is for DTV to come out with an HR34 model without internal storage and sell something similar to a TenBox (only with removable drives). And fix the program locking.

The extra cost always comes up when talking about RAID. It's a short-sighted perspective. How much programming is recorded on your DVR that you haven't watched yet? How much is it worth to you - or more like how much did you already pay for it? And how much of it won't be rebroadcast anytime soon? It doesn't take long before the insurance offered by RAID is dirt cheap. For me, I've had 2 drives fail in the last 5 years. The programming that was saved, not to mention the aggravation avoided, was easily worth the expense of RAID.


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## acostapimps (Nov 6, 2011)

I have a question I have a WD 1TB EHD that I had for a year and never had any problems with it, but one time will I was moving stuff around and i accidentally bump the external and fell but not too badly, and when i hooked it back up again I didn't think much of it until recently having picture freezing occasionally and the DVR won't respond and to had to reset and DVR would all of a sudden won't recognize the EHD and heard which sounded like a clicking sounds repeatedly from EHD,and all of a sudden started to work again and the clicking sound disappeared and started to spin normally and DVR recognized it again, is this a sign of EHD failing?


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

it sort of total offtopic (yes, the drive is bad - you'll need another one )
:backtotop:


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## Herdfan (Mar 18, 2006)

Rich said:


> I've always wondered how someone with a stock HDD in a 20 or 21 coped. Guess they just make do. So many families with kids and both parents working and *just not enough time to watch TV, *perhaps? I dunno.


That is the main reason for the need for large hard drives. I get the time to watch maybe an hour of TV per day. So if I want to be able to watch my shows, then I need to be able to store it for when I can watch it. If networks didn't take breaks in the middle of the season, I don't think I would ever catch up.



JonW said:


> I think it saves DirecTv a ton of money. Because all your recordings are locked away and tied to a specific DVR, the last thing you ever want to do is upgrade that DVR, or swap it out. You can't just swap DVRs or even service, you have to run the old side by side with the new until you've watched enough of your backlog to let it go.





Shades228 said:


> Perhaps you can explain the savings? If a customer orders another receiver and then pays the additional TV fee on it until they're done watching it then they would make money.


It saves and make them money. It isn't hard to imagine that if recordings on an eSATA from an HR21 could be moved to an HR24, that there would be a higher than normal failure rate on HR21's. And it make them money because as noted, I have my old HR20-700 doing nothing but serving up recordings.


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## docderwood (Oct 27, 2006)

unixguru said:


> Since we are talking about low consumer demand, why did the 2GB limit get removed for the HR34? If the logic is that DTV never does something unless there is a lot of demand then that change would never have been made. I've never met a Product Manager yet that was in favor of spending any time/money on upgrading core technology just to stay current with technology trends.
> 
> It sure wasn't done to make the few external storage geeks happy since it's not supported at all.
> 
> ...


Well written post. What I'd REALLY like is the ability to use a NAS on my network to backup/store stuff on the HR34.


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## bobcamp1 (Nov 8, 2007)

inkahauts said:


> I just don't thin the majority of people understand the concept of recording everything and watching latter, much less the need for more space if they are coming from cable where they had maybe 20 hours of recording space an snow have four or five times that.
> 
> People often don't get these concepts unless they. Are explained to them in a store or in their home by someone else who gets it.


The majority don't record EVERYTHING, just what they know they'll watch later. I think it's called, "having a life outside of TV", which I'm not familiar with. My parents never have more than 4 shows in their playlist. They record, watch it later that day or the next, then delete it. They just have 5 or 6 series links. They love their DVR, and it's from TWC (no accounting for taste)!

If you think about it, if some people only have an hour or two each day to watch TV, why do they record at a rate more than that? That'll produce a backlog of recorded shows that will never be watched. It's kind of like an electronic version of hoarding. If you wait longer than 6 months to watch it, the DVD for it will be out anyway. Just delete the unwatched show and let it go. 

I'm somewhere in between. My main 500 GB drive is never more than 80% full with four people using it. We do have shows from the last month or two but that's about it. The only exception is recordings of movies during the premium channels' free preview weekends. I don't know why we record them -- we never watch those movies and end up deleting them a year later still unwatched.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

Shades228 said:


> The fact is there isn't a demand because your average consumer just doesn't need it. If HD storage space was a primary driver of consumers needs for a DVR then cable companies would have increased their HD years ago.
> 
> This board is full of power users and even here only a small % use them. I'd be interested to see what % of DISH subs use this feature and it has everything that people here are asking for. I still bet it's a small % of DVR users that have the ability to do so.


That's the answer I've been getting for years. I believe it. I think it's typical of the Great American Herd to ignore the good things technology can provide. Or just not understand it. I don't think the eSATA function is a "good" thing, I think (hell, I know) it's a "great" thing.

But, I do believe you're correct in your assumptions.

Rich


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## rbpeirce (Feb 24, 2006)

RunnerFL said:


> FYI, OSX is BSD which is a variant of Linux.


Other way around. BSD is a variant of AT&T Unix and Linux came later as a way to get a PD form that was very similar.

Over the years they have gone slightly different ways but I am willing to bet that C source code for Linux programs would compile under OS X without too much trouble if it ran in a terminal window. There might be issues with libraries, but that might only be an issue for programs specifically needing Linux capabilities not present in BSD.

As an example, I had source from the old Unix ToolChest (System III) that I was able to compile with no problem under OS X. However, much of that has been replaced by GNU programs which I guess is the Unix variant of Linux.


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## CCarncross (Jul 19, 2005)

I've been using eSATA setups on my HR2x's since 2006, in all that time I've only lost 2 HDD's between my 3 DVR's....but several had been upgraded multiple times as larger capacity hdd's hit that pricepoint...like going from 1TB drives a few years ago, to 1.5TB, and finally 2TB's where I sit until they increase the allowable size on the HR2x line.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

CCarncross said:


> I've been using eSATA setups on my HR2x's since 2006, in all that time I've only lost 2 HDD's between my 3 DVR's....but several had been upgraded multiple times as larger capacity hdd's hit that pricepoint...like going from 1TB drives a few years ago, to 1.5TB, and finally 2TB's where I sit until they increase the allowable size on the HR2x line.


That's what I did too. Spent a lot of money doing it. With multiple HRs, I don't think I really need an HDD larger than 2TBs. Very rarely do I ever approach 20% Available on any of my HRs.

Rich


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## Drew2k (Aug 16, 2006)

unixguru said:


> [The Home Media Server] should have had at least 2 (RAID1) "storage cartridges" (ie consumer removable disk magazines). If Joe Consumer (and Joe Installer) can handle inserting and removing CDs and DVDs they can sure handle a disk cartridge. I can recall my 5-year-old son swapping Nintendo cartridges!
> 
> The obvious solution now is for DTV to come out with an HR34 model without internal storage and sell something similar to a TenBox (only with removable drives). And fix the program locking.


For several years HP sold a PC with a drive bay where users could plug in a USB drive and swap it out at will. It looked great and worked well, but HP stopped doing it because the plug-in drives were of course proprietary, undersized and expensive.

I love your idea of extending this to the HMC, and either allowing users to swap drives or if nothing else, giving techs spare drives to plug in during a service call. It's plug-and-play at its simplest.

This would require a much larger chassis, though, and likely will raise the cost of the devices, so unfortunately I don't see it happening. Would be really nice though ...


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## Richierich (Jan 10, 2008)

Rich said:


> That's what I did too. Spent a lot of money doing it. With multiple HRs, I don't think I really need an HDD larger than 2TBs. Very rarely do I ever approach 20% Available on any of my HRs.
> 
> Rich


I spent a lot of money buying Owned DVRs so I could Upgrade the Internal Hard Drives with 2 TB Hard Drives and now I am happy to have 7 DVRs with 14 Terabytes of Hard Drive Capacity.

3 of my 7 DVRs Backup the other 4 DVRs and that is their Sole Purpose.

And I just Love my WHDVR Service.


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## Herdfan (Mar 18, 2006)

bobcamp1 said:


> If you think about it, if some people only have an hour or two each day to watch TV, why do they record at a rate more than that? That'll produce a backlog of recorded shows that will never be watched. It's kind of like an electronic version of hoarding.


I do kind of agree on the hoarding comment. 

We over-record, but we do so for the times where are no new network shows on. Take the week before Thanksgiving. There will be no new shows on, so nothing will be recording. We will use this time to check out new series. For example, we are recording Vegas. We watched the Pilot and liked it, but not enough yet to have it bump 5-0 or Castle or Person of Interest. So episodes will pile up and we will get to it when nothing new is available. The network season is getting shorter and shorter, so we just make sure we always have something new.


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## bobcamp1 (Nov 8, 2007)

CCarncross said:


> I've been using eSATA setups on my HR2x's since 2006, in all that time I've only lost 2 HDD's between my 3 DVR's....but several had been upgraded multiple times as larger capacity hdd's hit that pricepoint...like going from 1TB drives a few years ago, to 1.5TB, and finally 2TB's where I sit until they increase the allowable size on the HR2x line.


Only the HR34 will ever support more that a 2.2 TB hard drive. There is a universal barrier at play here. Older PCs using BIOS also can't ever support more than 2.2 TB. The fix for the older receivers involves a significant firmware change and either playing games with the partition table (always dangerous) or formatting the hard drive, which would tick off just about everybody. It may even be a chipset limitation which would make it physically impossible.

In fact, I think the HR34 is the only DVR on this planet today that supports more than 2.2 TB hard drives.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Shades228 said:


> The fact is there isn't a demand because your average consumer just doesn't need it.


I disagree. In the case of the DIRECTV implementation, there are a number of impediments:
users can't bring themselves to "waste" the internal drive
little to no marketing of the feature
weak official documentation of the feature
uncertainty of what hardware will get you what you want
significantly more hardware combinations don't work 100% than do
having to reprogram recording preferences with each drive
all of your eggs in a bigger basket that cannot survive a DVR failure



> If HD storage space was a primary driver of consumers needs for a DVR then cable companies would have increased their HD years ago.


Most cable DVRs don't need a whole lot of space because so much of the content is _instantly_ available via VOD. Some cable setups don't even require a DVR for VOD. DIRECTV can't provide that kind of VOD accessibility so their customers _need_ to store it locally.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

bobcamp1 said:


> Older PCs using BIOS also can't ever support more than 2.2 TB.


You have to go back to Y2K's demon child, Windows Me, to find an operating system that relies on the motherboard BIOS for its low level hard drive functions.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

bobcamp1 said:


> *Only the HR34 will ever support more that a 2.2 TB hard drive.* There is a universal barrier at play here. Older PCs using BIOS also can't ever support more than 2.2 TB. The fix for the older receivers involves a significant firmware change and either playing games with the partition table (always dangerous) or formatting the hard drive, which would tick off just about everybody. It may even be a chipset limitation which would make it physically impossible.
> 
> In fact, I think the HR34 is the only DVR on this planet today that supports more than 2.2 TB hard drives.


Where is a 'magic' number 2.2 came from ?

No one did post partitioning of the HR34 with 3 TB drive. I would say it's using 2 TB of total space these 3/4 TB drives.

Dish is supporting 3 TB for EHD.

No need to do "_a significant firmware change_" (why you exaggerating ?), just a few changes related to buffer size (512->4096) and corresponding use of it.


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

P Smith said:


> No one did post partitioning of the HR34 with 3 TB drive. I would say it's using 2 TB of total space these 3/4 TB drives.


And you would be wrong... I'm pretty sure I posted the partition information and it is using all 3TB of a 3TB drive, all 4TB of a 4TB JBOD, all 6TB of a 6TB JBOD and all 12TB of a 12TB JBOD. My 9TB RAID 5 Array is using all 9TB.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

RunnerFL said:


> And you would be wrong... I'm pretty sure I posted the partition information and it is using all 3TB of a 3TB drive, all 4TB of a 4TB JBOD, all 6TB of a 6TB JBOD and all 12TB of a 12TB JBOD. My 9TB RAID 5 Array is using all 9TB.


Don't understand that. I know what a JBOD is but I don't understand what you're doing with all of the setups. In short, I'm lost. Whoosh.

Rich


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## palmgrower (Jul 18, 2011)

I'm lost as well, please explain.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

P Smith said:


> Dish is supporting 3 TB for EHD.


I'm relatively certain that this is a false statement.


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## bobcamp1 (Nov 8, 2007)

P Smith said:


> Where is a 'magic' number 2.2 came from ?
> 
> No one did post partitioning of the HR34 with 3 TB drive. I would say it's using 2 TB of total space these 3/4 TB drives.
> 
> ...


The MBR can only support 2^32 unique LBAs, because it only supports 32-bit values for them.

2^32 * 512 bytes/sector = 2.2 TB. No partition can go past the 2.2 TB point on the hard drive when using MBR.

You need to replace the MBR with a GPT, update all the built-in disk tools (ex. gdisk not fdisk) accordingly, and whatever little misc. things the software and/or firmware might need to get it to work. It's not trivial, especially when trying to do it remotely for millions of customers with existing boxes full of recordings they'd like to keep.

It's a lot easier to do what D* did -- create a new branch of software for a new device and have that device support it from its initial release.

It was thought that advanced format drives would set this limitation to 17.6 TB, but to make them backward compatible they emulated 512 bytes/sector. Each one of those emulated sectors needs a unique LBA entry, and you have the same exact problem.

The THR22-100 (and all Tivos) have the same problem, as the Apple Partition Manager is also limited to 32-bit LBA entries.


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

Rich said:


> Don't understand that. I know what a JBOD is but I don't understand what you're doing with all of the setups. In short, I'm lost. Whoosh.
> 
> Rich


I tested each setup out using 2 RAID enclosures that I have to verify that the HR34 was in fact using the entire drive. One enclosure holds 2 drives. With that enclosure I tested 3TB RAID 1 (2x3TB drives), 6TB JBOD (2x3TB drives) and 4TB JBOD (2x2TB drives). The other enclosure I have holds 4 drives and supports RAID 5. With it I tested 12TB JBOD (4x3TB Drives) and I settled on using 9TB RAID 5 (4x3TB Drives).


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

harsh said:


> I'm relatively certain that this is a false statement.


Then you'll eat a crow ! Ready ?


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

bobcamp1 said:


> The MBR can only support 2^32 unique LBAs, because it only supports 32-bit values for them.
> 
> 2^32 * 512 bytes/sector = 2.2 TB. No partition can go past the 2.2 TB point on the hard drive when using MBR.
> 
> ...


OK. I would use TiB when giving the number, but not everyone could separate computer's and marketing count of bytes. :eek2:

Now turn on your math skills again and do same for newest HDD which has 4K sector's size.
Continue counting ... what is your result ?

EDIT: Done ? So you would still using MBR and it would not required that dramatic changes in FW.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

RunnerFL said:


> I tested each setup out using 2 RAID enclosures that I have to verify that the HR34 was in fact using the entire drive. One enclosure holds 2 drives. With that enclosure I tested 3TB RAID 1 (2x3TB drives), 6TB JBOD (2x3TB drives) and 4TB JBOD (2x2TB drives). The other enclosure I have holds 4 drives and supports RAID 5. With it I tested 12TB JBOD (4x3TB Drives) and I settled on using 9TB RAID 5 (4x3TB Drives).


Can't find your post where the big drives/volumes partitions posted ...


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

P Smith said:


> Can't find your post where the big drives/volumes partitions posted ...


Well here's where I at least posted the size of DirecTV's partition for each setup.

http://www.dbstalk.com/showpost.php?p=3104713&postcount=174

You can search for the rest.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

I did expect fdisk output ...


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

P Smith said:


> I did expect fdisk output ...


Then you should do some testing.

Oh, and fdisk won't work with GPT. But you already knew that, right?


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

GPT ? I don't remember if it was mentioned. For sure 4K drives could work with MBR just fine. As it done by dish for support big EHD drives.


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

docderwood said:


> Well written post. What I'd REALLY like is the ability to use a NAS on my network to backup/store stuff on the HR34.


Conceptually that would be really nice.

From a practical perspective it creates a lot of issues. NAS has to be carefully engineered in a large enterprise environment. Even there it's not suitable for all purposes.

I've been doing high-end enterprise-scale software engineering for 30 years (storage focus the last 12 years). If I were developing DTV's software I would never consider supporting NAS. Would be asking for disaster.


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

Rich said:


> Shades228 said:
> 
> 
> > The fact is there isn't a demand because your average consumer just doesn't need it. If HD storage space was a primary driver of consumers needs for a DVR then cable companies would have increased their HD years ago.
> ...


Most companies belong to another kind of herd - the *Good Enough Herd*. In the technology realm the most successful member of that herd was/is Micro$oft. Most companies like that model and follow it like a religion. DTV is a full member of that herd.

If you don't _have_ to make something better then the greater herd will just keep sending you money.

Another company has emerged that has a different approach. Innovate and provide something that consumers *will want* once they see it. Apple.

Proven that it's better for consumers and the company. Way better. Think I recently read that the iPhone is bigger revenue than all of Micro$oft!

Whether you prefer the products of one or the other of the mentioned companies, it doesn't matter. The comparative financial performance is a direct representation of how the majority of consumers have voted.

The chances of DTV adopting that model are... well, very slim.


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

rbpeirce said:


> Other way around. BSD is a variant of AT&T Unix and Linux came later as a way to get a PD form that was very similar.


Apologize for the off topic... Unix History

Linux is not a direct derivative of any Unix. It's a Unix-like clone. Except of course for the stealing of code that happened in later years - and was never enforced because of the details of who currently owned what rights to Unix.



rbpeirce said:


> However, much of that has been replaced by GNU programs which I guess is the Unix variant of Linux.


This is incorrect. Those with interest can see Wikipedia for the facts.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

unixguru said:


> Since we are talking about low consumer demand, *why did the 2GB limit get removed for the HR34*? If the logic is that DTV never does something unless there is a lot of demand then that change would never have been made. I've never met a Product Manager yet that was in favor of spending any time/money on upgrading core technology just to stay current with technology trends.


I think it finally dawned on some intelligent person at D* that a 1TB drive hooked up to five tuners would be a problem.



> It sure wasn't done to make the few external storage geeks happy since it's not supported at all.


While the eSATA function is not "supported", they do make changes at times to it. I'm still against it being supported. For many reasons. Mainly, because I like the idea that I can use any HDD I want to. I really don't want to be limited in my choices.



> That means that larger internal storage is coming - because there is demand for it. It's a *duh* moment for a device marketed as a "Home Media Server".


Yup. Just putting all your eggs in a larger basket.



> The gist of this thread, whether internal or external storage, is that as the capacity rises people will be utilizing it and the reaction to a device failure is going to be hotter.


Yup, just wait till the first person has a catastrophic failure of an HR such as the 34 with a four TB HDD on it.



> I'm sure the average consumer has not a care in the world about RAID storage either. They don't even have a clue that such a thing is available. But I would be surprised if any consumer was happy about a DTV DVR failure! If they were aware that technology existed that prevented loss from a drive failure they would WANT IT. Likewise if they knew their programming could be easily transferred if the box died, they would WANT IT. Neither of these is difficult.


Exactly.



> What is a moderate irritation today is going to be a whole world of hurt when an "average consumer" finds out that >2TB of programming for their entire household is GONE.


Should be interesting watching someone go ballistic. Always is... :lol:



> It's just lame that a "Home Media Server" was even brought to market without both of these issues being addressed. It should have had at least 2 (RAID1) "storage cartridges" (ie consumer removable disk magazines). If Joe Consumer (and Joe Installer) can handle inserting and removing CDs and DVDs they can sure handle a disk cartridge. I can recall my 5-year-old son swapping Nintendo cartridges!


Pretty normal for D* to release equipment that's not well thought out. Then fix it after torturing a bunch of people.



> The obvious solution now is for DTV to come out with an HR34 model without internal storage and sell something similar to a TenBox (only with removable drives). And fix the program locking.


That makes sense.



> The extra cost always comes up when talking about RAID. It's a short-sighted perspective. How much programming is recorded on your DVR that you haven't watched yet? How much is it worth to you - or more like how much did you already pay for it? And how much of it won't be rebroadcast anytime soon? It doesn't take long before the insurance offered by RAID is dirt cheap. For me, I've had 2 drives fail in the last 5 years. The programming that was saved, not to mention the aggravation avoided, was easily worth the expense of RAID.


There are other options other than RAID, but whatever works for someone is good. Having 12 active HRs works really well. I haven't missed a show in a long time due to failure of an HR or an HDD.

Good post!

Rich


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

Drew2k said:


> For several years HP sold a PC with a drive bay where users could plug in a USB drive and swap it out at will. It looked great and worked well, but HP stopped doing it because the plug-in drives were of course proprietary, undersized and expensive.
> 
> I love your idea of extending this to the HMC, and either allowing users to swap drives or if nothing else, giving techs spare drives to plug in during a service call. It's plug-and-play at its simplest.
> 
> This would require a much larger chassis, though, and likely will raise the cost of the devices, so unfortunately I don't see it happening. Would be really nice though ...


The expense issue is pretty much gone. SATA drives are, by definition, hot-swappable. The bare drive connectors can stick right out the back of the cartridge. No electronics glue of any kind. The only reason a cartridge is needed at all is to protect the bare circuit board on the one side of the drive. A simple piece of plastic with holes for ventilation is all that is required to make a consumer-friendly cartridge.

Cheap enclosures like the Sans Digital already have a cartridge that is almost what is needed. They are just a U-shaped piece of plastic with maybe a small metal rail on each side. Most of them don't have any kind of cover over the drive circuit board. These are sold to consumers so the assumption apparently is that consumers are smart enough to avoid static discharge to the circuit board  In any event, adding a piece of plastic with holes in it would add only pennies to the cost.

The RDX cartridge is a current example. They use 2.5" drives. The mobile drive has some extra shock-tolerance features (retracted heads). No reason DTV couldn't do something similar with 3.5" drives and rate them with less shock resistance - after all, the usage scenario is completely different.

It would increase the price to do it internally. Bigger case, power supply, fan. But not a huge amount. Again, look at the price of a Sans Digital 2 drive enclosure. The HR34 is a premium device.

But we don't need a new generation of HR34. Just make something like a TenBox with drive cartridges. The AM21 was a great solution for OTA for the subset of people who wanted it. External RAID would be the same for storage space and reliability. The development and manufacturing cost would be minimal; nothing special, no software to develop, etc.

Lots of enterprise arrays have an LED on each drive slot that lights up when the drive is defective. Shouldn't even need a truck roll for this - just ship out a new cartridge and a return label. Lexmark laser printer cartridges, for example, have used that approach forever.


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## bobcamp1 (Nov 8, 2007)

P Smith said:


> OK. I would use TiB when giving the number, but not everyone could separate computer's and marketing count of bytes. :eek2:
> 
> Now turn on your math skills again and do same for newest HDD which has 4K sector's size.
> Continue counting ... what is your result ?
> ...


OK, I'm counting the first six physical consecutive sectors on a typical Advanced Format drive....

0, 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, ....

Hmmm... I've only counted six sectors yet the number I need to use to access that sector (its LBA) is already at 40. I have to count by 8's. The number '8' comes from 4096/512. The hard drives physical sector size is 4k, but its logical sector size is still stuck at 512 bytes/sector. And the logical sector size is what the OS uses to access it. So the MBR limitation still exists.

That's why these drives are also called "512e". They emulate everything, good and bad, from the old style 512 bytes/sector drives.

I don't expect the emulation to go on forever. There's already "4k native" (4Kn) external USB drives. But it's going to be a while before they become popular because OSs are just starting to support them. For example, Windows 7 doesn't support it but Windows 7 SP1 does (which is why you need to slipstream SP1 into your bootable Windows 7 DVD).

I have no idea if the version of Linux in the HR34 supports 512e only or if it can do 4Kn. Does anyone know the model of the hard drive in it? Or you could plug in a 4Kn eSATA drive in and see if the HR34 can use it.


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

Rich said:


> There are other options other than RAID, but whatever works for someone is good. Having 12 active HRs works really well. I haven't missed a show in a long time due to failure of an HR or an HDD.


Yes, redundancy at the entire device level works - and is better actually given the inability to move storage/programs to another device.

But it adds a lot of operational overhead. MRV is half-baked. Cannot do all operations from any device remotely. No ability to say device 2 mirrors device 1 (i.e. records everything that the other does). Etc.

I suppose they *could*, in the future, allow more than one HR34 in a house. Allow one device to mirror the other (actually needs to be a 2-way mirror so that when one fails and is replaced the new one is automatically brought back into sync). Let the C31 automatically fallback to the alternate upon failure...

(That is actually similar to a standard failover cluster in the enterprise world. There one uses one set of RAID storage connected via a redundant storage network [fibre channel, iscsi, fcoe, etc] with 2 or more hosts running cluster software. Complicated and EXPENSIVE!)

That's a much more expensive approach: purchasing the 2nd device, paying the additional receiver fee every month, developing and supporting a lot more software, etc. Movable RAID is a much cheaper solution.


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

Rich said:


> While the eSATA function is not "supported", they do make changes at times to it. I'm still against it being supported. For many reasons. Mainly, because I like the idea that I can use any HDD I want to. I really don't want to be limited in my choices.


You're assuming that if it becomes "supported" that it will be changed in such a way as to disable anything other than the specific device they are "supporting".

I don't think that's likely. More likely they would support the device(s) they have blessed and the rest would remain as today - works but not supported.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

bobcamp1 said:


> OK, I'm counting the first six physical consecutive sectors on a typical Advanced Format drive....
> 
> 0, 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, ....
> 
> ...


I'm talking about support of 4k drives not emulation.
Using MBR and increasing space by using same vector: 32 bits.
If you continue live in a past, then here is simple answer: 2.2 TB x 8 = 17.6 TB.
That is new limit for using old MBR. See my other post about _real_ partitioning of 3 TB EHD by dish.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

P Smith said:


> Then you'll eat a crow ! Ready ?


I'm ready for some detailed factual information as opposed to your verbally confusing teases and hints.


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## RunnerFL (Jan 5, 2006)

P Smith said:


> GPT ? I don't remember if it was mentioned. For sure 4K drives could work with MBR just fine. As it done by dish for support big EHD drives.


Well you can trust me or you can try it yourself. You decide.


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## TBoneit (Jul 27, 2006)

bobcamp1 said:


> OK, I'm counting the first six physical consecutive sectors on a typical Advanced Format drive....
> 
> 0, 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, ....
> 
> ...


I don't see why you would need to slipstream SP1, Who would use a 4Tb boot drive?
My computers boot Drives are 120Gb, 160Gb and 300Gb. All SSD The two laptops with the smaller drives, They are more than large enough. The Desktop has 2Tb data drives Since I use it to capture, convert and Author BluRay. And I use 2Tb USB3 drives to back up from the desktop for their speed.

TB


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Oh, yeah. I forgot to note - WinXP Pro SP3 working fine with 4K sector size 3 TB drive in GoFlex enclosure.


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## JonW (Dec 21, 2006)

300GB was nice back when we were recording SD and that could hold 200+ hours, but if you record primarily HD, it fills up real fast. 3TB is actually a reasonable number for a HD DVR in my book.

Alas, another problem is that the DVRs weren't designed with that much space in mind. It's not surprising that an MRV'd DVR with a combined playlist is going to get sluggish when those playlists can hold 10x the data originally intended.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

JonW said:


> 300GB was nice back when we were recording SD and that could hold 200+ hours, but if you record primarily HD, it fills up real fast. 3TB is actually a reasonable number for a HD DVR in my book.
> 
> Alas, *another problem is that the DVRs weren't designed with that much space in mind*. It's not surprising that an MRV'd DVR with a combined playlist is going to get sluggish when those playlists can hold 10x the data originally intended.


I wouldn't say that blindly (but I would be glad to see blueprints of FW) at least what I saw: they does employ DB approach for store and update EPG and system info ...


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

unixguru said:


> You're assuming that if it becomes "supported" that it will be changed in such a way as to disable anything other than the specific device they are "supporting".
> 
> I don't think that's likely. More likely they would support the device(s) they have blessed and the rest would remain as today - works but not supported.


I'm afraid of D* taking over the external function. They haven't "blessed" any HDDs or external devices. They made a mistake by suggesting the Seagate eSATA and were right about suggesting the WD device. Aside from that, they've been quiet. The Seagate bombed, by the way. I just hope they leave the choices of what we use to us and don't try to shove something we don't want down our throats.

Rich


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

JonW said:


> 300GB was nice back when we were recording SD and that could hold 200+ hours, but if you record primarily HD, it fills up real fast. 3TB is actually a reasonable number for a HD DVR in my book.


For someone with one or two HRs, a 3TB drive would seem to be sufficient. But with many more HRs, 2TBs are more than sufficient. The drawback to the 3TB drives is losing the HR that recorded its content. Then it becomes a horror story.



> Alas, another problem is that the DVRs weren't designed with that much space in mind. It's not surprising that an MRV'd DVR with a combined playlist is going to get sluggish when those playlists can hold 10x the data originally intended.


I've got a huge UPL and my 24-500s handle that UPL just fine. Obviously, I don't have 10 times the capacity of my eleven 2TB drives on the UPL, that would be a bit much.

Rich


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## bobcamp1 (Nov 8, 2007)

P Smith said:


> Oh, yeah. I forgot to note - WinXP Pro SP3 working fine with 4K sector size 3 TB drive in GoFlex enclosure.


That's because XP supports 4k logical sectors for a *secondary* USB drive. Take the drive out of the enclosure and connect it directly to SATA and see what happens. My motherboard thinks a 3TB hard drive is only 800 GB (the capacity overflowed: 3 TB - 2.2 TB = 800 GB).

The drive inside the GoFlex enclosure has physical 512 bytes/sector, yet has 4k logical sectors in order to get around the MBR limit. That's a hardware modification -- you've added a special hard disk controller to get around the limit. How would D* put that inside millions of existing DVRs?

There are also other third-party drivers that let XP support GPT. But that hard drive can't contain the system partition, because that driver can't load until the kernel is loaded.

If people have tried it with an HR2x and it doesn't work, then the OS they have (or the chipset they have) doesn't support it. I don't think they're changing code just to add support to something that's not officially supported.


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## bobcamp1 (Nov 8, 2007)

JonW said:


> 300GB was nice back when we were recording SD and that could hold 200+ hours, but if you record primarily HD, it fills up real fast. 3TB is actually a reasonable number for a HD DVR in my book.
> 
> Alas, another problem is that the DVRs weren't designed with that much space in mind. It's not surprising that an MRV'd DVR with a combined playlist is going to get sluggish when those playlists can hold 10x the data originally intended.


That happens with Tivos. When I increased the size of my Series 1's hard drive from 20 GB to 120 GB, and I had a lot of shows saved on it, it would take 8 seconds to bring up the playlist. Deleting a bunch of shows sped it right back up. Trick play was not affected. But that 54 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM just couldn't process that gigantic database quickly. The same thing happens with the Series 4, but to a lesser extent.


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

"JonW" said:


> 300GB was nice back when we were recording SD and that could hold 200+ hours, but if you record primarily HD, it fills up real fast. 3TB is actually a reasonable number for a HD DVR in my book.
> 
> Alas, another problem is that the DVRs weren't designed with that much space in mind. It's not surprising that an MRV'd DVR with a combined playlist is going to get sluggish when those playlists can hold 10x the data originally intended.


My HR24 and my HR34 do not show any signs of speed changes based on the drive being empty or completely full, I've checked, they always work at the same speeds, and that's with 2tb drives. My hr21s slow down a little, which Leeds me to believe that they are just underpowered, since they are slow anyway, even compared to an HR20.


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

"Rich" said:


> For someone with one or two HRs, a 3TB drive would seem to be sufficient. But with many more HRs, 2TBs are more than sufficient. The drawback to the 3TB drives is losing the HR that recorded its content. Then it becomes a horror story.
> 
> I've got a huge UPL and my 24-500s handle that UPL just fine. Obviously, I don't have 10 times the capacity of my eleven 2TB drives on the UPL, that would be a bit much.
> 
> Rich


I'd bet for 99% of DirecTV subs though, the only reason to have a 3tb drive would be because they have a lot of people recording different things with little overlap, so a failure would only cause everyone to lose a little bit of programing, and not everyone to lose 3tb worth of recordings.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

bobcamp1 said:


> That's because XP supports 4k logical sectors for a *secondary* USB drive. Take the drive out of the enclosure and connect it directly to SATA and see what happens. My motherboard thinks a 3TB hard drive is only 800 GB (the capacity overflowed: 3 TB - 2.2 TB = 800 GB).
> 
> *The drive inside the GoFlex enclosure has physical 512 bytes/sector, yet has 4k logical sectors in order to get around the MBR limit. * That's a hardware modification -- you've added a special hard disk controller to get around the limit. How would D* put that inside millions of existing DVRs?
> 
> ...


You got it backwards:

```
'hdparm -I' knows that this is a native 4k disk:
       Model Number:       ST3000DM001-9YN166
       Logical  Sector size:                   512 bytes
       Physical Sector size:                  4096 bytes
       Logical Sector-0 offset:                  0 bytes
       device size with M = 1024*1024:     2861588 MBytes
       device size with M = 1000*1000:     3000592 MBytes (3000 GB)
```
Here is good reading about 4K sectors, emulation etc : http://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/advanced-format-4k-sector-hard-drives-master-ti/


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

This thread is funny. We have so many ideas, and DirecTV must just laugh all day long because all of our wants in this regard are probably shared by less than10k subs, making all these ideas of how to provide redundancy not worth the time to even consider for them, especially when a workaround exists, which I think rich is taking advantage of to its fullest.


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

inkahauts said:


> This thread is funny. We have so many ideas, and DirecTV must just laugh all day long because all of our wants in this regard are probably shared by less than10k subs, making all these ideas of how to provide redundancy not worth the time to even consider for them, especially when a workaround exists, which I think rich is taking advantage of to its fullest.


About the same for OTA yet they have a product for that.

The problem is a catch-22. The "average consumer" doesn't have a clue about what might happen (many don't even backup their computers). And most won't ever see a hardware failure. But when someone gets hit, even more so now with a "Home Media Server" and likely pending storage increase, it's gonna hurt. Until they get hit they won't know to ask for solutions. And with no official product available to solve it they aren't alerted to the possibilities.

You can bet that nobody at DTV or a retailer is going to tell a customer what will happen if a DVR fails unless they are directly asked about it. They have nothing to "up sell" and they sure don't want to advertise their weaknesses.

Consider if just 1 company, cable, DISH, whatever, starts selling a more resilient device, even as an optional premium product. Then they will be explaining to consumers why they might want it. This will create demand for a product that doesn't currently (officially) exist. Because people like reliable products. Then all the sudden all the competitors will have to offer a more reliable product. Why be the follower? Try leading for a change.

The workaround is a PITA for most.


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

inkahauts said:


> I'd bet for 99% of DirecTV subs though, the only reason to have a 3tb drive would be because they have a lot of people recording different things with little overlap, so a failure would only cause everyone to lose a little bit of programing, and not everyone to lose 3tb worth of recordings.


So the fact that everyone in my family has to share the pain is going to make it less?

Sure not the way my family works. I'd be the one getting the mob of "customer" complaints. They can lynch me. :lol:

This is no different than a home computer network. Our server has RAID storage too (and backups).

It's all a no-brainer. These are services that should be as reliable as anything else in the house. Would a similar failure rate be acceptable for a furnace, air conditioner, water heater, stove, refrigerator, freezer, microwave, ...? Those are all more reliable and to top it off one can get a service guy here with parts really quickly and when they are done it's back to full operation. May not even lose food. Lose a freezer full of food because of slow service and it's the same kind of $$ loss.

I know _it's just TV_. If I lost 2 months worth of a series where the story evolves each episode then I pretty much lost the whole season. Total value is comparable to a freezer full of food. With DTV I know that a failure means that I lose it all regardless of how fast the service.


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## bobcamp1 (Nov 8, 2007)

P Smith said:


> You got it backwards:
> 
> ```
> 'hdparm -I' knows that this is a native 4k disk:
> ...


No, I'm (almost) right. I should have made it more clear that the controller is doing the emulation of the 4k logical sectors. The drive is definitely 512 bytes/sector. Do you have the 3 TB version of this drive?

http://www.everythingusb.com/seagate-goflex-desk-external-hard-drive-21441.html

Scroll down to "Breaking the 2TB Limit".

In theory, if such a device exists for eSATA instead of USB, then you might be able to use it. 4k logical sector support has been in Linux for quite a while. But the capacity rollover I described above (with my old motherboard) could still be an issue.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

You're still not get it right. You just ignoring data what is posted; BTW, I got the data from MY OWN DRIVE.

Please read original SEAGATE docs, not the some user like you posts (if you will re-read his explanation again you could get grasp of 4k native size (and 512e for OS concept) properly) . And lets finish the off-topic posting.


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## Diana C (Mar 30, 2007)

P Smith said:


> You got it backwards:
> 
> ```
> 'hdparm -I' knows that this is a native 4k disk:
> ...


Pardon my butting in on this argument, but what you are showing here is a AF drive in 512e mode. That's fine...this is required for a lots of software (like backup/restore programs) that interact with the drive at a sector level and are not 4K sector aware.

But I am unclear about what that has to do with the original issue of MBR vs. GPT. I guess you could have a MBR drive, using 4k logical and physical sectors exceed the 2.2TB limit, but both your *hardware* and your *OS* (and any direct disk accessing software) would have to understand 4K sectors. Boot from a "traditional" disk and add a driver and you can avoid some of the hardware (BIOS) issues, and maybe you could run via 512e on the storage only drive.

But 512e is not a good solution for a DVR since you will often have the situation of misaligned file boundaries. If one video file uses 3 emulated 512 sectors inside one 4K sector, and then the next file wants to use the other 5, you'd have to read the entire 4K sector into memory, merge the new data with the old, and then rewrite the entire sector. This is bound to happen since the DVR software, by definition in this example, thinks it is running on a 512 byte sector drive. Now imagine doing this for 5 write and 3 read processes at once and you pretty soon get someplace I don't think you want to be.

Sure, there are plenty of ways to get 4K sector drives to work...but given the parameters of a DVR I think you either want it done via 512 byte emulation in some dedicated hardware (i.e. a USB drive, which is how Dish does it) or you want to do it through native 4K sector support in the OS (which is exactly what DirecTV has done in the HR34).


----------



## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

unixguru said:


> About the same for OTA yet they have a product for that.
> 
> The problem is a catch-22. The "average consumer" doesn't have a clue about what might happen (many don't even backup their computers). And most won't ever see a hardware failure. But when someone gets hit, even more so now with a "Home Media Server" and likely pending storage increase, it's gonna hurt. Until they get hit they won't know to ask for solutions. And with no official product available to solve it they aren't alerted to the possibilities.
> 
> ...


That workaround was the best I could think of. Yeah, it would be a PITA for most folks. And it was/is expensive. But it works quite well.

Rich


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## Diana C (Mar 30, 2007)

Rich said:


> I'm afraid of D* taking over the external function. They haven't "blessed" any HDDs or external devices. They made a mistake by suggesting the Seagate eSATA and were right about suggesting the WD device. Aside from that, they've been quiet. The Seagate bombed, by the way. I just hope they leave the choices of what we use to us and don't try to shove something we don't want down our throats.
> 
> Rich


I think you're 100% correct...there would be "official" external drive enclosures. DirecTV has shown that they like nice, predictable, installation configurations. This is not uncommon...most companies want to make things as cookie-cutter as possible - it is the easiest way to scale an operation. There is no way they would ever support "any old" ESATA drive/enclosure.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

unixguru said:


> So the fact that everyone in my family has to share the pain is going to make it less?
> 
> Sure not the way my family works. I'd be the one getting the mob of "customer" complaints. They can lynch me. :lol:


I get all the complaints from my family, too. I hate to see my wife, with fire in her eyes, heading for me with a problem. My son just depends on me to fix everything. My granddaughter comes to me and looks at me with those beautiful puppy dog eyes and asks me to fix what ever isn't working for her.



> It's all a no-brainer. These are services that should be as reliable as anything else in the house. Would a similar failure rate be acceptable for a furnace, air conditioner, water heater, stove, refrigerator, freezer, microwave, ...? Those are all more reliable and to top it off one can get a service guy here with parts really quickly and when they are done it's back to full operation. May not even lose food. Lose a freezer full of food because of slow service and it's the same kind of $$ loss.


There you'll get the good old "it's only TV" answer.



> I know _it's just TV_. If I lost 2 months worth of a series where the story evolves each episode then I pretty much lost the whole season. Total value is comparable to a freezer full of food. With DTV I know that a failure means that I lose it all regardless of how fast the service.


At least if you lose a freezer full of food for most reasons, your homeowner's insurance will cover it. Who covers what a person with 4TBs of content loses if his 34 fails?

I agree with everything you've said. But, we're gonna be told we're in the minority and we don't matter. Been thru this many times and the answer's always the same. We are anomalies. Nobody but a few of us take advantage of the eSATA function. Not enough people care. If all those answers are valid, why did D* allow larger external HDDs for the 34s?

Rich


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

Diana C said:


> I think you're 100% correct...there would be "official" external drive enclosures. DirecTV has shown that they like nice, predictable, installation configurations. This is not uncommon...most companies want to make things as cookie-cutter as possible - it is the easiest way to scale an operation. There is no way they would ever support "any old" ESATA drive/enclosure.


We've gone this long without their overt support, I'd like to see it stay that way. They have improved the eSATA function over the years and for that I salute them.

Rich


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

Diana C said:


> Pardon my butting in on this argument, but what you are showing here is a AF drive in 512e mode...


Tell that to bobcamp1, not to me - I did explain a couple times, but he still insist on his own mistake.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

Diana C said:


> Pardon my butting in on this argument, but what you are showing here is a AF drive in 512e mode. That's fine...this is required for a lots of software (like backup/restore programs) that interact with the drive at a sector level and are not 4K sector aware.
> 
> But I am unclear about what that has to do with the original issue of MBR vs. GPT. I guess you could have a MBR drive, using 4k logical and physical sectors exceed the 2.2TB limit, but both your *hardware* and your *OS* (and any direct disk accessing software) would have to understand 4K sectors. Boot from a "traditional" disk and add a driver and you can avoid some of the hardware (BIOS) issues, and maybe you could run via 512e on the storage only drive.
> 
> ...


Whoosh... :lol:

Rich


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

That would be overstated statement about HW incapability without any technical point of that

- current HW is OK to work with 4K sectors, just need to do some updates on DVR Linux drivers and core as it was done in Linux world ...


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

Rich said:


> That workaround was the best I could think of. Yeah, it would be a PITA for most folks. And it was/is expensive. But it works quite well.


You've certainly got the most robust arrangement I've ever heard of. (Although it can't handle a natural disaster )

It's the best you can do given the tools DTV gives us.

It's far from cheap or user friendly. DTV needs to give us better solutions.


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

Rich said:


> There you'll get the good old "it's only TV" answer.


Sure. My wife has a wall of bookcases stuffed full of books. If those were lost would people say "they're only books"?

Both are entertainment. Personally I'm not big on books but I understand their value to people.



Rich said:


> At least if you lose a freezer full of food for most reasons, your homeowner's insurance will cover it.


Food and books are easily replaceable.

Lots of DTV programming is not easily replaceable.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

unixguru said:


> You've certainly got the most robust arrangement I've ever heard of. (Although it can't handle a natural disaster )


What can?



> It's the best you can do given the tools DTV gives us.
> 
> It's far from cheap or user friendly. DTV needs to give us better solutions.


It was the only thing I could think of to do. If I hadn't spent the money for six owned HRs and 2TB drives for each one, it would have been a lot less, but it was worth it. I bought six 20-700s from MDU folks who had been the only owners and they all worked well. I bought them because D*'s replacement HRs were a royal PITA. I planned on using them as replacements, but they worked so well I sent a bunch of leased 20-700s and 21s back to D* and began to use the owned 20-700s. Naturally, with my luck, the 20-700s stabilized and I never had to use them as replacements.

Once all the HRs are programmed with the appropriate SLs, the system is more user friendly than I expected it to be.

Rich


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

unixguru said:


> Sure. My wife has a wall of bookcases stuffed full of books. If those were lost would people say "they're only books"?
> 
> Both are entertainment. Personally I'm not big on books but I understand their value to people.


Don't know what to say about that. "It's only TV" is a pretty common answer for all the problems we have. I don't like it either.



> Food and books are easily replaceable.
> 
> Lots of DTV programming is not easily replaceable.


So true. Not impossible, but not easy either.

Rich


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

Rich said:


> unixguru said:
> 
> 
> > You've certainly got the most robust arrangement I've ever heard of. (Although it can't handle a natural disaster )
> ...


Now they will send us to an institution :grin:

*If* external storage could be moved from one DVR to another... then all you need is a pair of RAID storage devices with builtin replication and a fast pipe to a geographically distant location. Every block of data changed on A shows up on B. Lose A, still have all data at B. Standard operating procedure in enterprise computing for important stuff (accounting, inventory, etc).

Obviously that doesn't make sense - ever.

Would be a lot cheaper (no need for fast pipe) to have service at two locations and record everything at both. Of course then you definitely would want the ability to manage the DVR entirely from the internet.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

unixguru said:


> Now they will send us to an institution :grin:
> 
> *If* external storage could be moved from one DVR to another... then all you need is a pair of RAID storage devices with builtin replication and a fast pipe to a geographically distant location. Every block of data changed on A shows up on B. Lose A, still have all data at B. Standard operating procedure in enterprise computing for important stuff (accounting, inventory, etc).
> 
> ...


And you'd be paying for two accounts.

Rich


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

unixguru said:


> So the fact that everyone in my family has to share the pain is going to make it less?
> 
> Sure not the way my family works. I'd be the one getting the mob of "customer" complaints. They can lynch me. :lol:
> 
> ...


!rolling

No, I don't think you understood my point. Everyone losing just a little means that most likely everyone will be able to find their shows online, and won't actually miss anything.

However, I see with the new genie ads, they have something listed that I have not yet seen, so I am hoping it comes soon and will be a far better resolution to the idea that you have lost your dvr. It appears as though they are trying to get it set up so that you can always go back and watch anything that was on in the last five weeks. I would assume this means they are trying to get a full on demand recording of every show for the last five weeks available to everyone. That will solve the issue of redundancy for 99.99% of their customers. Won''t help me, as I record seasons at a time, and then watch in big groups some shows, but as I know most people don't watch like I do....


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

Rich said:


> And you'd be paying for two accounts.


Sure. Disaster-proof is expensive. Two accounts are nothing compared to a fat data pipe for replication.


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## Rich (Feb 22, 2007)

inkahauts said:


> !rolling
> 
> No, I don't think you understood my point. Everyone losing just a little means that most likely everyone will be able to find their shows online, and won't actually miss anything.
> 
> However, I see with the new genie ads, they have something listed that I have not yet seen, so I am hoping it comes soon and will be a far better resolution to the idea that you have lost your dvr. It appears as though they are trying to get it set up so that you can always go back and watch anything that was on in the last five weeks. I would assume this means they are trying to get a full on demand recording of every show for the last five weeks available to everyone. That will solve the issue of redundancy for 99.99% of their customers. * Won''t help me, as I record seasons at a time, and then watch in big groups some shows, but as I know most people don't watch like I do....*


That's the way we watch series, too. We can't be the only ones who watch a series after the season ends. They built that 34 with little thought. Just put out a five tuner HR with a paltry 1TB drive in it that we would fill up quickly, making it a necessity to purchase an external device and a huge HDD.

Putting content on VOD is a fix of sorts, but it would be much easier to allow us to have the ability to watch the contents of any HDD recorded on any HR within an account on any HR within that account. It's the only way I can see to solve the problem.

I'm waiting patiently for the first person who puts a 4TB drive on a 34 to have that 34 fail (and they will, don't kid yourselves about that) and with it goes all the programming on that huge drive. Lost forever.

Rich


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## unixguru (Jul 9, 2007)

inkahauts said:


> !rolling
> 
> No, I don't think you understood my point. Everyone losing just a little means that most likely everyone will be able to find their shows online, and won't actually miss anything.
> 
> However, I see with the new genie ads, they have something listed that I have not yet seen, so I am hoping it comes soon and will be a far better resolution to the idea that you have lost your dvr. It appears as though they are trying to get it set up so that you can always go back and watch anything that was on in the last five weeks. I would assume this means they are trying to get a full on demand recording of every show for the last five weeks available to everyone. That will solve the issue of redundancy for 99.99% of their customers. Won''t help me, as I record seasons at a time, and then watch in big groups some shows, but as I know most people don't watch like I do....


There have been times in the past where we've lost a program due to a storm and we couldn't find it online - even months later.

Besides the time it takes to search for stuff online, when it's found it's always low-def. I put a lot of money into equipment and services for *HD*. DTV can stuff their low-def On Demand.

I've already outlined the right way to do things...

http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?p=3014794#post3014794
http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?p=3067523#post3067523


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