External drive for DirecTV DVR

[toysmost]

You know I'm a little new to the whole dvr scene, but I'm really amazed that the one thing that really bugs me the most, is never talked about. With all the problems with these junk units DTV is "leasing" why does everyone seem to accept the fact that if there is a problem where you need to reformat or replace your unit, there is NO WAY to backup all of our time consuming and sometimes irreplaceable recordings? I just love it when the tech says "just reformat and that MIGHT fix the problem". Ummm ya just what I want to do...spend 70 hours of my time making recordings of shows just to errase all of them...

I also love when I complain about the cost of the HD DVR and the rep tells me that I'm getting a real DEAL on the unit since it costs thousands of dollars to produce... ya it costs big money because there's $800.00 worth of useless, usb, IEE1394, SATA, and ethernet ports on it that are totally unusable..

Why don't they make it so I can attach an external hard drive to it and backup my recordings so when I reformat it I can just copy my stuff back on it?

[pzieger]

The SATA port is enabled but not officially supported. If you attach a Seagate Freeagent Pro 750gb drive via eSata cable it will switch from the internal drive and ONLY use the external with 3 times the capacity. If you later disconnect the external is will switch back to the internal with whatever recording are there still playable. Unfortunately the external drive is keyed to the DVR, ie, if you swap out for a new unit the recording on the external are no playable from the new unit. If they were to remove that restriction if would allow swapping out the DVR and retaining your recordings.

[jhecondevsys]

The reason TOYSMOST as to why, "everyone seem to accept the fact that if there is a problem where you need to reformat or replace your unit" is because most contributers to this site are more concerned about how many ports/cables/gb, etc., etc., etc., can dance on the head of a pin than to do anything constructive to solving this problem at the source...which, of course, is DirecTV. That's why "planning" will always be much more popular than "implementation".

[regman]

So let me make sure that I have this correct. The only drive it will currently accept is an SATA drive and NOT a USB drive. I had one tech tell me that the USB ports were not plugged into the motherboard. I haven't opened mine up yet. It would be sweet if USB drives could be used - they're dirt cheap right now. Fryes has 500G USB stand alone drives for 119 bucks. 1 terabyte for 399.00. The tech also said that they have no plans, to his knowledge, to activate the USB drive.

[joed32]

ESATA only.

[pzieger]

I'm sure the reason they use the ESATA port is that it has a much faster transfer rate than USB2. There have been many PC tests on this with the results showing ESATA being 2 to 3 times faster. Since HD is a high bandwidth creature, USB might choke under these conditions.
FYI - My Seagate FreeAgent 750gb ESATA drive has been purring for a month now on my HR20 with no problems whatsoever.

[davetx]

I just purchased the 750GB FreeAgent Pro at Fry's open box. It did not come with a SATA cable, but it is for usb/sata and it has a SATA connector on the drive. Should a cable have come with it? And is any setup necessary? You may contact me at [email protected].

Dave

[pzieger]

I just purchased the 750GB FreeAgent Pro at Fry's open box. It did not come with a SATA cable, but it is for usb/sata and it has a SATA connector on the drive. Should a cable have come with it? And is any setup necessary? You may contact me at [email protected].
Dave

They don't come with the eSATA cable, you will need to get one. I got the cable from www.monoprice.com for $3.50 (Product number 2882). Other places seem to charge much more. I actually bought 4 to make it worthwhile for a total of $18.60 including shipping. It will require you to cut a little of the rubber off of the cable end that goes into the drive so the cable will seat correctly. If you don't, the shoulder of the connector can't seat in all the way and will have an intermittant connection.
Pete

[dllmrobinson]

A simple external drive solution that doesn't void the warranty is excellent news!

I have some questions about how this works in practice. When I upgraded my DirecTV TiVo Sony T60 to a bajillion hours, the Now Playing catalog slowed down to a crawl. The way they had implemented the index was so slow at higher capacities, it required a separate RAM cache device (and associated constantly-overwritten-by-updates driver) to be efficient.

I was looking at some of the RAID-onboard enclosures that convert multiple drives into a single large LUN on a single eSATA channel (5TB<$200 for the enclosure!), but I'm afraid I'll just be turning my DVR into a turtle. I have just a few questions:

Does a H20-100 have a similar slow-down problem with expanded capacities, especially when using an external drive?

Does the R15 standard definition DirecTV DVR also have this capability?


Thanks,

David

[pzieger]

I have used my HR20-700 with internal drive and with an external Seagate FreeAgent 750gb (with only 8% free space) and haven't noticed any slowdown. That's not to say there isn't any but it doesn't bother me if there is like it did on my old Tivo Series 1 mega upgrade. I don't hava an R15 but I went to the DirecTV site and looked in Customer Service/System Manuals (a great resource) and the picture of the back of the unit does not show an ESATA connector.
Pete