The Drive that is on the 942!

[Altaman]

Well opened up my 9200 (942 to dish people) as being that it was a rainy day figured I would see what the drive is in the 9200. Well it is a WD2500JD 250 gig drive...I would have connected to my computer to take a look at the drive contents, but alas I do not have a SATA controller.

Anyways there are now 400 gig SATA drives out that are calling me...Alt you need me, Alt you want me, Alt buy me! We all know the answer at this time. Anyways I recall in Scott's review he did not want to remove the warranty void sticker to find out the drive in it, so figured I would let ya all know what is in there.

Alt

 

[Van]

Anyone come up with a working software for these hard drives yet so that the o/s on the drive can be transfered over like they do on tivo's?

 

[Smith P.]

Well opened up my 9200 (942 to dish people) as being that it was a rainy day figured I would see what the drive is in the 9200. Well it is a WD2500JD 250 gig drive...I would have connected to my computer to take a look at the drive contents, but alas I do not have a SATA controller.

Anyways there are now 400 gig SATA drives out that are calling me...Alt you need me, Alt you want me, Alt buy me! We all know the answer at this time. Anyways I recall in Scott's review he did not want to remove the warranty void sticker to find out the drive in it, so figured I would let ya all know what is in there.

Alt

Thank you for your courtesy - will be interesting if you'll try to install clean 300 or 400 GB disk and see if it will initialized OK.

 

[Altaman]

It will not work installing just any drive into the 942, the firmware has a list builtin about the type of drives the machine will accept. Also I believe you have to get the OS over to the new drive as well. Dish does not make it easy for the enduser to upgrade the drive. What I would like to do is mount an external drive as a 400 gigger and have the 250 as well. This would give about 65+ hours of HD recording

Another thought is to have the internal and external and if the internal failed, the external would still work, allowing the enduser to still use the system and change out the drive at a later date. Sounds too logical, so odds are it will never happen.

Alt

 

[Gregg Loewen]

hi guys

I am a moron when it comes to PCs, etc. How can you mount external drive to this unit? Instructions or links? I very much want to do this,

Thanks!!

Gregg

 

[Altaman]

The 9200 has two Usb 2.0 ports that at this time are disabled. Once Dish enables the ports and allows extrenal drives in the firmware, it is simply a matter of adding the external drive. The catch here is not just enabling the ports, but is Dish going to go a locked format like they do with the internal drive or allow the owner to put any drive they want onto the port.

Alt

 

[Smith P.]

Altaman.
How do you know ? It was discovered for 522 and 625, but I don't see any post about 942 restricted hard drive list.

 

[Altaman]

On avsforum there is a list of the approved drives, unfortunately they are all 250gig drives. Here is the lsit form there:

WDC WD2500JB-55GVA1
WDC WD2500JB-57GVA1
WDC WD2500JD-57HBB1
ST3250823ACE
ST3250823SCE
WDC WD2500JD-55HBB1
Maxtor 7Y250M0
Maxtor 7Y250P0

anything else will report a error.

BTW it seems that if the drive is on the approved list, the 942 will format and setup the drive with no problems. If this is true it seems that Dish is becoming alot nicer ablout allowing the user to change drive without jumpping though hoops to get there.

Alt

 

[Smith P.]

That list show both types - SATA and PATA drives. Is there different HW version of 942 ?

 

[Altaman]

Here is the thread on avsforum, I just passed along the info:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=550668

Alt

 

[yottabit]

When I first received my 942 I tried to connect the 250 GB SATA drive to my Linux machine in order to image it in case of failure (it's a WDC, so it's bound to fail sooner than later... though Maxtor is worse and Seagate consumer drives are on-par; I'd prefer a Hitachi hands-down).

The drive wouldn't spin up... I'm assuming either that the receiver sends a proprietary spin-up command to the drive, or that the drive defaults to require a spin-up SCSI command from the controller (all of the SATA controllers I've ever used don't offer this option).

I was thinking maybe I could allow the receiver to spin the drive up, then yank the SATA cable out and plug it into my PC... haven't tried that one yet.

I would love to be able to add a nice 400 GB Hitachi drive to the system... but I'm not holding my breath...

 

[Purogamer]

Dish really needs to get with it, we're not all filthy pirates, we just want more room without having to beg uncle charlie for a new model receiver with more space...We're a computer-savvy country, anyone who wants to add more space to their model should be able to do so with relative ease.

It's silly already. Not everyone only records 'survivor' and then deletes it, some of us would like to keep things for a while...