EHD and Upgrade from Hopper 2 to 3

[tobsandmags]

I'm replacing my Hopper 2/Sling with a Hopper 3. I recall quite a few posts about EHD drive issues on the Hopper 3 with some post noting their drives did not working anymore or not being able to transfer shows back and forth. Did these get cleared up?

Sounds like I will still get the black screen the 1st time you try to view a show from the EHD....requiring you to go find the show again and relaunch it.

 

[charlesrshell]

I'm replacing my Hopper 2/Sling with a Hopper 3. I recall quite a few posts about EHD drive issues on the Hopper 3 with some post noting their drives did not working anymore or not being able to transfer shows back and forth. Did these get cleared up?

Sounds like I will still get the black screen the 1st time you try to view a show from the EHD....requiring you to go find the show again and relaunch it.

I have not had any EHD black screen issues with my Hopper 3s.

 

[KAB]

I'm replacing my Hopper 2/Sling with a Hopper 3. I recall quite a few posts about EHD drive issues on the Hopper 3 with some post noting their drives did not working anymore or not being able to transfer shows back and forth. Did these get cleared up?

Sounds like I will still get the black screen the 1st time you try to view a show from the EHD....requiring you to go find the show again and relaunch it.

The software upgrade that caused all the problems has been fixed.

 

[joewhite57]

I just recently fixed the EHD 3 step operation on my H3. All I had to do was let my 6 year old WD crash and take 6 years of movies and tv shows with it. New 2 terabyte drive formatted by the H3 no more issues. Almost painless

 

[navychop]

"RAID 1 array."

 

[KAB]

I just recently fixed the EHD 3 step operation on my H3. All I had to do was let my 6 year old WD crash and take 6 years of movies and tv shows with it. New 2 terabyte drive formatted by the H3 no more issues. Almost painless

But 2T is just more to lose if and when it dies. I don't do any larger than one1 T...then two 500GBs.

 

[dweber]

My 2 Hopper 3 receivers still have issues with my 3 western digital external drives. One time my external drives stopped showing up on my Family Room Hopper3. I had to power down the drives and when they powered back up they showed up.

Also, playing content on all three external drives requires the following steps:

1) Select external drive from sources
2) select a program on the external drive
3) Select Start Over
4) Error message shows up for 1 sec saying drive needs activation
5) Get blank screen
6) Hit Guide and select a new channel
7) Get error message 314 Your request can only be carried out in live mode. Switch to live mode?
8) Select Yes
9 Repeat steps 1, 2, and 3.
10) The second time the external drive program works.

All of my external drives are Powered Western Digital 2 terabyte drives. They all worked all the time with the old interface on my Hopper with sling receivers. I should also tell you that my 3 external drives range in age from 2007, 2010, and 2016. My one drive has 100 movies, the second drive has 57 events and the third drive has 75 programs.

Last week at 2:30 AM I woke up to see my Joey 2 powered on. The Joey 2 had error 1303 - Looking for Hopper. I turned on the Family Room TV which is connected to my Hopper3. It displayed message 770 - Checking External Hard Drive. A routine test is being performed on your external hard drive. This test can take up to 50 minutes to complete. Once the test is completed or stopped, your receiver will reset. The reset process should take no more than 5 minutes to complete.

It took approximately 2 hours for the Hopper 3 to complete the drive tests but I do have 2 hard drives connected to that Hopper 3. When it finished, I checked and all of the content was still present on the drives.

By the way, I have no problems transferring content to and from the Hopper3 and the external drives.

I have talked to Dish Tier 2 support and they are aware of the problem. They claim that Dish is working on the problem.

What surprises me is that some people claim to have no problems playing content on their external drives. The Dish technician told me that the problem exists.

 

[jerryez]

The problem exists on both the HWS and H3.

 

[KAB]

The problem exists on both the HWS and H3.

Not my H3. No problems at all since the Big Fix a few months ago.

 

[dweber]

Not my H3. No problems at all since the Big Fix a few months ago.

So what is different about your setup that has eliminated the disk problem? What is the model and year of your external disk drive? How much content have you archived and how often do you play archived content? You need to share your solution with the Dish engineers so that they can share it with the rest of us.

Are there different hardware versions of the Hopper 3?

My transceiver firmware is 0011 running software version U501 and bootstrap version 1012 on both of my Hopper 3 receivers and I have had the problems listed in my post 7.

 

[KAB]

So what is different about your setup that has eliminated the disk problem? What is the model and year of your external disk drive? How much content have you archived and how often do you play archived content? You need to share your solution with the Dish engineers so that they can share it with the rest of us.

Are there different hardware versions of the Hopper 3?

My transceiver firmware is 0011 running software version U501 and bootstrap version 1012 on both of my Hopper 3 receivers and I have had the problems listed in my post 7.

I have no problem, therefore no solution to share! I use internal WD drives in docks.

 

[glynnp]

Not my H3. No problems at all since the Big Fix a few months ago.

Apparently this "Big Fix" doesn't have a "Big Footprint" as the problem is still on my year old H3.

It's not a Big Deal for me and rises to the level of mildly annoying.

 

[Dave90000]

My H3 is still doing the black screen the first time also. Maybe with a little luck one of the engineers will get off their ass and fix this and the home media before we die of old age.

 

[odbrv]

I also don't have any EHD problems since the fix awhile back. I have 3 EHDs, 500 gb , 1tb, and 2 tb. They are all older models with many years of use. I see them all in the sources file and can play back everything , even recordings from channels that haven't existed for years.

 

[KAB]

All of you with problems....have you disabled the drive's sleep mode? That's why I like bare drives...no firmware to cause problems.

 

[dweber]

How would you disable sleep mode? The Dish receiver formats the drive so I would think that any software control on the drive would be erased during the format. One of my drives was formatted by a VIP622 receiver while the other 2 drives were formatted by Hopper with Sling receivers. Again, all of the drives worked all the time with the old interface. I believe that the disk is initially accessed since the directory of available content is displayed. It fails the first time you try to play the content. I don't believe the problem is with the drives. I believe that it is more of an internal timing issue of how the Hopper is allocating ports. I wish I could talk to one of their software engineers. As a former controls engineer, I know the intermittent problems that can occur with interrupts if the timing is not correct.

 

[KAB]

How would you disable sleep mode? The Dish receiver formats the drive so I would think that any software control on the drive would be erased during the format.

That is incorrect. Again, it's a firmware, isolated from the drive. Google disabling external WD sleep mode. If I knew I would walk you through, but like I said, I bypass that problem.

 

[Jim5506]

If they have a name brand EHD in an external enclosure, the manufacturer has a software tool to turn on/off sleep mode.

Go to the manufacturer's website and download their EHD management software.

BTY, you'll probably want to remove all your recordings, because you'll have to connect the drive to windows and maybe even format it so windows can read it ( not so sure about that one).

5+ years ago WD, Seagate, etc., started with the sleep mode for these drives to make them last longer = cheaper parts.

I too use internal drives in a dock, and I usually limit myself to 250GB or 500Gb drives, but they are getting hard to find.

Last month I lost a 3TB drive that had several hundred HD StarTrek episodes on it I had recorded off of BBC America - back to the smaller drives.

 

[navychop]

Go with hardware RAID 1 arrays. Then don't sweat an HDD failure.

View attachment 127812

Three RAID and one regular.

 

[Jim5506]

Go with hardware RAID 1 arrays. Then don't sweat an HDD failure.

View attachment 127812

Three RAID and one regular.

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