1TB esata drive freezes on Direct TV

[tramies]

Hello all

March 6th I installed a LaCie 1TB Big Disk Extreme eSATA drive on my HR20.... At 1st the picture would freeze constantly where it drove my familiy crazy!!! had to reboot it at times also.... After a couple of weeks it leveled off and stopped freezing. A couple of nights ago YES... during American Idol of course....It froze like crazy!!! Very annoying and more crap from the family who only embraces new technology when it is absolutely PERFECT. Anyway I unplugged it this morning to the original internal drive that is in the HR20 to see if it still would freeze. Has anyone had the system freeze with an external drive? Could it be the brand or quality of the drive? One of my tech friends suggested that my LaCie drive is a "dual drive" instead of a single drive. I called Direct TV tech support & they suggested that I reformat the drive through system set up... What should I do??

Tom

 

[jcrandall]

WELCOME to Satelliteguys!

It is entirely possible that a bad sector or data error on the drive caused the freeze. It could be the box too. You could hook it to a computer and do a low-level format to the drive, which will take some time, but will eliminate any concern of "if" the drive is failing. Try it with the internal drive for a while too. Is it in a cool situation, or does the receiver temperature get real high? There is a temp in the system info screen, something around 115 is normal.

 

[tramies]

I don't think it is getting hot.....It started freezing the minute I hooked up the external drive... I will check the temp if it freezes again..

 

[jcrandall]

Try that formatting on the drive to see if there are any errors. If so, you should get it replaced from the drive's warranty.

I don't have a 1tb drive, but have 2 750gb's that have worked great for almost a year now.

 

[schneid]

Cavalry 1TB

I just sent my second one of these back. I was experiencing pixelization, stuttering, and the "do want to delete" a recorded program without the option to watch it until the first drive died completely. The replacement lasted two hours before it died.

So it definitely sounds like a drive problem or is the D* eSATA implementation itself buggy. I have no problems with my HR20-100 using the internal drive.

 

[Jimbo]

Jason,
If the OP has a HR20, my -700's run anywhere from 116 to 127* and work fine, I would say that anything above 127* should be looked into, but the older -700's ran hotter and worked fine at that temp.

As for the ESATA drives, the OP should not be calling D* about these as D* does not officially support ANY External drives, unless this info came out receintly and I missed it.
Your pretty much on your own with EHD's, but then again, thats why there are sites like this one to help people with questions.

I personally have never used the Calvery brand, but have been using a Seagate 750 for over a year now with NO problems.

Jimbo