External hard drive
- Thread starter lynxville
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The answer is how much are you willing to spend, do you want to order from the internet or buy locally. The smaller the capacity the lower the price, do you want to back up everything on the internal hard drive or just selected programs.
Just to be clear you cant make a copy of your recordings. You can only transfer. Recordings, selected or all are only on the EHD or the Hopper. The size can be anywhere up to 2TBs. As Boba stated its how much you want to spend. A requirement though is that they must have their own power source, not USB powered. As to what make, just search the forum as their are gazillions of recommendations here.
Most folks around here use WD. Reliable, and usually just as good a price as any others. Seagates used to be notorious for their sleep modes not "waking up". Not sure if it was ever corrected, but I would still stay away from them.
Everyone from this site recommended I get the Western Digital MyBook, which is what I got. It's great!
I use a 1tb WD my Book external hard drive. I have 80 movies on it and still have 416gb available for less than $100.
I use a hot swap dock and have a couple HDDs that I can swap around. I put a dock at each hopper and can move a drive easily. Also have drive cases to store the unused drives.
I like the dock because if one fails then I just replace it and don't have to break into the enclosure or take it apart. YMMV
I use WD drives.
I like the dock because if one fails then I just replace it and don't have to break into the enclosure or take it apart. YMMV
I use WD drives.
The Sleep Problem is that when it goes to sleep, usually after 10s of minutes of no use, it fails to wake up for further use. So power off and on again.
-Ken
-Ken
The sleep issue was especially prevalent on the VIP series of receivers when Dish first introduced the EHD.
The "sleep issue" is that the firmware on the drive turns off the spinning motor after a certain amount of idle time, which is easily tripped by EHDs on a Dish DVR, i.e., except for the 221/411 series, the EHD is only used while moving programming to it or when playing a program.
Dish receivers do not have the same capacity to awaken these drives as a PC does, for whatever reason.
Dish could probably add some lines of code that would fix this, but you know Dish, "just because it's broke, don't expect us to fix it".
Dish receivers do not have the same capacity to awaken these drives as a PC does, for whatever reason.
Dish could probably add some lines of code that would fix this, but you know Dish, "just because it's broke, don't expect us to fix it".
I also had a lot of problems with Seagate and Maxtor drives going into sleep mode. Only way to wake them up was to remove and reconnect power to the external HD, and sometimes I also had to unplug and replug the USB connector from the back of the Dish receiver. After a while this got very annoying. For some drives with this problem, there was a program that you could download to turn off sleep mode, but this was a poor solution, and there were many Seagate drives that did not support changing this parameter.
Right out of the box, the WD drives are compatible with the Dish receivers. They go into sleep mode, but the Dish receiver is able to wake them up properly when you want to use them.
Right out of the box, the WD drives are compatible with the Dish receivers. They go into sleep mode, but the Dish receiver is able to wake them up properly when you want to use them.
Seagate drives have a utility that you can turn that function off with. Just hook up the drive to your pc and run the utility to switch off sleep mode.
