External Hard Drive Limitations for Hopper

[mrbrock72]

Very belated update. Have been able to get a 5TB drive connected and functioning properly. Pretty sure that even larger drives will work, possibly up to 8TB. The key I believe is to get a drive enclosure that reports the drive's capacity in 4k sector sizes. When reporting 4K sectors, the total numbers of sectors remains below 2^32 which does not overflow fields in the MBR partitioning scheme. Here is the drive enclosure I purchased on Amazon that works well.

Thanks for confirming that the Sabrent enclosure works. I was looking at that one the other day on Amazon and was going to order it. Which model hard drive do you have installed? I was going to try a 3TB one. Maybe this one - Amazon product ASIN B008JJLW4M
I tried 2 different external hard drives from BestBuy last week but neither would work with my H3.
These DO NOT work.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/seagate...lack/3137006.p?id=1219088032454&skuId=3137006
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-my-b...lack/1765014.p?id=1219063232061&skuId=1765014

 

[mrbrock72]

I was able to get a 3TB HGST internal drive to work in the Sabrent enclosure. The H3 formatted it to 2.8TB.
Amazon product ASIN B00HHAJU7KAmazon product ASIN B013WODZH0
These articles convinced me to go with the HGST drive instead of WD or Seagate. The HGST has a 3 year warranty and is very quiet. The Sabrent enclosure has a built in fan and is quiet.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q2-2016/
http://arstechnica.com/information-...uper-reliable-seagates-have-greatly-improved/
http://arstechnica.com/information-...ll-rules-the-roost-for-hard-disk-reliability/

 

[docdaddy]

Do we have a list of EHDs here somewhere that are proven to work with the H3, and a list of those to avoid?

And do you still have to use a USB drive that has an external power supply? In an article on Tom's Hardware they show someone hooking up a WD My Passport Slim USB drive (no external power.)
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/dish-hopper-transfer-recordings,review-3501.html

 

[exp1orer]

I'm posting this in hopes that it will help someone else.

I have a 4TB WD Mybook. I just needed to transfer my recordings from one hopper to another but I only owned the 4TB. I plugged it in and it formatted on the receiver fine, but it wouldn't let me transfer shows.
I was getting an 855 error. I deduced that even though it looked like the receiver was recognizing it just fine, the limitation of 2 TB was the deal breaker.

However, I went into windows Disk Management and noticed that the Hopper had created 4 partitions on the drive. 1 - 1TB partition, 2 - 500GB partitions and a 4th partition with the remainder of the space on the drive (nearly 2 TB). I right clicked on the large remainder partition and selected delete. This changed the remainder to un-allocated. I plugged it back in and it transferred fine. This was great for me because I just needed 2 TB of space to move my shows from one hopper to another.I was able to do it with my 4TB drive without going out and buying one.


Good day!

 

[hey]

i ain't read this whole thread, but FWIW i got a WD elements 2tb portable (self-powered) drive that works fine with my H3. YMMV.

 

[Notoriginal841]

I just tried the Sabrent Enclosure with a 3TB Toshiba P300 Desktop Internal Hard Drive and my H2 recognized it out of the box, no additional formatting required. 2793 GB. I just wish I would have known this before I bought my two 2TB drives.

Sabrent Enclosure
Toshiba P300 Drive

 

[Notoriginal841]

I just tried the Sabrent Enclosure with a 3TB Toshiba P300 Desktop Internal Hard Drive and my H2 recognized it out of the box, no additional formatting required. 2793 GB. I just wish I would have known this before I bought my two 2TB drives.

Sabrent Enclosure
Toshiba P300 Drive

Update: The 3TB Toshiba doesn't work with the new Carbon UI. But the new UI does in fact support 3 external hard drives.

 

[allargon]

I'm curious, since the format restrictions of the EHDs is bit atiquated, did you format the entire drive as one big partition? Or did you create 7 or so partitions on the drive? I suspect the the MAC may have been using something other than the MBR partitioning scheme, perhaps GPT. I've found that my hopper won't offer to format drives using GPT.

Sorry to update an old thread. On Windows, MiniTool (freeware) can be used to create ext3 partitions. Indeed GPT is initially required for 3TB or larger drives. (Seriously, Dish. It's getting harder and harder to find 2TB drives these days.)

 

[allargon]

Sorry to update an old thread. On Windows, MiniTool (freeware) can be used to create ext3 partitions. Indeed GPT is initially required for 3TB or larger drives. (Seriously, Dish. It's getting harder and harder to find 2TB drives these days.)

Update: I ran into the same issues with GPT. My HWS reported the external disk size as having 0GB of free space. I had to use a gparted live cd and alternate b/w the gparted GUI and fdisk to get a msdos/MBR formatted disk. All of the Windows graphical tools complained when exceeding 2TB. Either way, neither path was for those who aren't technically skilled.

My 722k had no problems formatting 3TB/4TB external disks. The HWS apparently did. Dish went backwards?