My 211 Receiver Powers my External Hard Drive. Is this OK?

[mezab]

I have a 500 gb portable hard drive (Western Digital) with no power supply. Just for the heck of it, I decided to hook it up to my 211 receiver and was surprised that it worked. It's been working great for 4 weeks.

Everything I read on the dish website and these forums say that you can only use a hard drive with it's own power supply, and that the receiver doesn't have enough power to feed an external hard drive.

If it works fine, do I have anything to worry about? Will I fry my receiver? Then why would DISH say that your hard drive needs to have it's own power supply?

 

[dfergie]

You might eventually lose the programs that are on it.

 

[Tampa8]

My 612's most definitely does not power an EHD, nor does my neighbor's 722K. I have not seen a post where the receiver powered the EHD. Unless you find out a 211 is meant to do it, I wouldn't put anything important on the EHD.

 

[TheKrell]

I think most self-powered laptop drives actually draw more than 0.5 amps to spin up. Looking at the specs at the WD website, I see that most of the old ones also draw 0.5 amps (right at the USB limit) during writing. Only the newest draw about half that. Perhaps your drive only pulls half the USB standard and will work fine for years. I did have a SSD plugged into my 612 and it worked fine for a few days.

 

[dwarren2]

The original manual "recommended" a powered ehd. It was till later that they said it had to be powered.

 

[mmcl26554]

If you cannot verify the the current draw is less than 500ma then you can use an external powered USB hub which will supply the needed power to the EHD. I have tested this and it works fine.

 

[3HaloODST]

Powered USB hub is only $13 ( Newegg.com - Rosewill RHUB-210 USB 2.0 4-Port Hub with Power Adapter .) Not worth the risk IMO to run it unpowered, when a hub is so cheap.

 

[mmcl26554]

And Amazon has them for $3.03 shipping $2.95, and they work just fine.

 

[mezab]

Thanks for all your input. I use this 211 with the Western Digital portable drive mainly for short term DVR functionality, not much long term archiving. So I won't be crying if I lose any programs should the drive crash.

Actually, the reason I tried the portable drive in the first place was because my normal 1TB Seagate desktop drive would crash every week and I would have to hook it up to my PC to to wipe it first before the 211 would reformat it for use again.

It seems to me that the EHD DVR system in general is far less reliable then an internal hard drive. My new setup of this WD portable drive is working fabulously and I hate to disturb it.

In case anyone is wondering, it is model # WDBACY5000ABK. You can see more info here... My Passport Essential

 

[TheKrell]

I can't find the power consumption of that drive even by drilling down to the PDF. Anyhow, it's almost certain to be one of the newest and lowest power drives since it's USB3.

 

[mmcl26554]

If you haven't done so already you may want to do a surface scan on your old drive, to check for bad sectors and mark them. This could be the reason for the problems you are having with it.

 

[upsss]

Most of the new 2.5" USB HD drives are designed for laptops and draw less than 0.5A which is the max. current that a USB interface can provide and generally they don't come with external power supply. Drives that drew more than 0.5A and didn't come with external power supply they had a dual USB cable.

The DISH requirement for an external power supply came when most of the USB HD drives were 3.5" and drew much more than 0.5A. If it has been working reliably for 4 weeks I would leave it alone.