Updated 622 External Storage Information

[Foxbat]

Ok a few things...

1) I was reading another Satellite Forum and a staff member of that forum gave some confusing information which a few of you have PMed me about he said...

my understanding is that only one USB External drive can be used at one time and you can play content from the External USB drive.

You can only have one drive hooked up to your 622 at a time, however you can have unlimited hard drives which you can use at anytime, your(sic) not locked into one harddrive for all your accounts.

Hmmm, if I recall, the scuttlebutt from the Summit was that as many as four USB 2.0 drives could be connected, 750GB max per drive. I'm sure it's easier to deal with the drives one at a time instead of providing a means to select the drive you want from the external device list. But I still would like to be able to have multiple drives supported. That, or a household NAS device.

 

[Smith P.]

A pop-up saying "you've attached an external HDD...." doesn't mean that it recognizes all 1Tb though. It may only format it up to 750gb and people may not know until it's completely enabled and the available space is listed in the receiver's menus.

Interfacing bigger disk thru PocketDish become stuck at a point of requirement of FAT file system, not that easy for regular ppl to find a way to format 200+ GB disk as FAT. Yes, it is related to PD, not future ESD, but we still not seen what file system format in the future ESD used.

 

[Hall]

Does FAT have a hard limit or does the cluster size become so inefficient that it's too wasteful ?? FAT, or is it FAT32, also has a per-file size cap of 2gb or 4gb (can't recall at the moment).

 

[John Kotches]

Hmmm, if I recall, the scuttlebutt from the Summit was that as many as four USB 2.0 drives could be connected, 750GB max per drive. I'm sure it's easier to deal with the drives one at a time instead of providing a means to select the drive you want from the external device list. But I still would like to be able to have multiple drives supported. That, or a household NAS device.

I got slammed when I mentioned NAS a while back That's definitely the path to go although I'd like to see Gigabit as the interface.

Cheers,

 

[n0qcu]

Does FAT have a hard limit or does the cluster size become so inefficient that it's too wasteful ?? FAT, or is it FAT32, also has a per-file size cap of 2gb or 4gb (can't recall at the moment).

The info that came with my USB drive says FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit.

 

[TheForce]

As many will recall, the old 921 had this 250 G limit. When we were experimenting with the different drive sizes for the 921, evweryone discovered the format did have this finite partition size that set the limit. Paul, weren't you trying to experiment on manually increasing that program partition but faild as the real limitation was in the 921 that it just wouldn't address anything beyond the "25 Hr limit for HD" The drive itself had 5 partitions created and these took up fixed space as well but the one large one could not be expanded, making the 250 the optimum drive for the 921. I would not be surprised that this is also the case with the 750 limit now for the 622. But the unknown of all this is that an external drive is not the main drive so there may be no limit, just that Dish has not tested the 1 Tb drives as they have those below 750.
I will probably be one of the first to try it since I have a WD 1 TB drive here which is really two 500G drives in a box set for Raid 1 or Raid 0 depending on what you want. I haven't even opened it yet. It was purchased for a mac video editing project that fell through so I end up with this drive that I decided to just keep for this use. Should be interesting to see what configurations it will work in with the 622.
Meanwhile, we know what we did with the 921, but there has been little information on what will work officially with the 622. I have no expectations and will just go with what ever it can do. I am just thrilled this is finally getting here.

 

[TheForce]

Fat 32 is limited to 4Gb per file. Therefore it is not a good format to use for long form video

 

[RickDee]

External Disk File System

Since the 622 uses Linux software, why wouldn't the hard drive be formated to Ext3 or something compatible with Linux? I realize Linux can access and write FAT/FAT32, but it's not the most efficient way to transact. It would be much more logical to use a more or less native Linux file system.

FAT32 uses extremely large clusters when you're talking 250GB, 500GB, 750GB, & 1TB. FAT32 is not as reliable nor efficient as Ext3.

 

[Smith P.]

Fat 32 is limited to 4Gb per file. Therefore it is not a good format to use for long form video

Another valuable point why HD transfer blocked for PocketDish.

 

[Smith P.]

Since the 622 uses Linux software, why wouldn't the hard drive be formated to Ext3 or something compatible with Linux? I realize Linux can access and write FAT/FAT32, but it's not the most efficient way to transact. It would be much more logical to use a more or less native Linux file system.

FAT32 uses extremely large clusters when you're talking 250GB, 500GB, 750GB, & 1TB. FAT32 is not as reliable nor efficient as Ext3.

I can tell by your words "622's EFS uses extremely large clusters when you're talking 250GB, 500GB, 750GB, & 1TB"; read: EFS cluster size is 2 MB and bigger.

 

[John Kotches]

Fat 32 is limited to 4Gb per file. Therefore it is not a good format to use for long form video

I thought it was limited to 2GB (ie a 32-bit signed integer).

Cheers,

 

[Smith P.]

Well, what's important to have negative file size, instead of using the bit for double span capacity?

 

[TheForce]

John- You may be right, It's been awhile since I tried it but I have a Fat 32 drive here and will let you know in a few minutes.

Back- I saw several 2.6 and 3.1 and a 3.85 Gig video files on the 120 G WD Passport drive I had formatted to FAT32. Nothing over that and the project I looked at had several missing files that would have been about 6G which is why I had to copy the project back to NTFS drive to complete it.

 

[Hall]

There shouldn't be any reason to create multiple partitions on external drives unlike what they need to do with internal drives. They say larger than 750gb might work but that's probably due to the fact that they've done limited testing on anything larger. Even Newegg only has (4) available and three of them are the same (retail, OEM, and open box).

 

[Smith P.]

John was wrong - file size limit is 4 GB for FAT FS.

 

[DefDude]

my 522 has send option

I know this may be an old unit but when I go to multimedia in the menu on my 522 and select external usb device/no device attached, for a split second behind "there is no mutimedia device connected to the usb port" it has the option to send to device. does anyone know if I can send my movies that I have saved in sd to the new external hd that I will buy soon and be able to watch them on my 622. I watched the video and it seemed he was saying towards the end that you could take your hd to any unit with usb not just the 622 I looked for other forums and have not seen any clear answer.

 

[navychop]

FAT/FAT32/Ext3 - what does it matter? Hasn't it been established that the system will use a unique, proprietary format?

 

[John Kotches]

FAT/FAT32/Ext3 - what does it matter? Hasn't it been established that the system will use a unique, proprietary format?

No. All that's been established is that it will be encrypted on the disk. It is unlikely that Dish will create their own file system software; that is a lot of work.

Cheers,

 

[TheForce]

There shouldn't be any reason to create multiple partitions on external drives unlike what they need to do with internal drives. They say larger than 750gb might work but that's probably due to the fact that they've done limited testing on anything larger. Even Newegg only has (4) available and three of them are the same (retail, OEM, and open box).

Well since we're all speculating on this, I side with your assessment. However, I feel the limitation may be more in line with number of titles allowed in the list than Gb size of the external hard drive.

BTW- I bought my 1 Tb drive at CompUSA. They had several in stock at each store in town back in June.

 

[Smith P.]

No. All that's been established is that it will be encrypted on the disk. It is unlikely that Dish will create their own file system software; that is a lot of work.

Cheers,

Well, if you did read post#90, then you probably knew about Dish's EFS, i.e. own file system what has been created back to time of 501/508 and still using in 622/722.