Using thumb drives as EHD

[navychop]

I believe the Dish DVRs require a minimum EHD size of 40 or 50 GB. We can now buy thumb drives of 256GB and maybe larger. Has anyone tried to use such thumb drives? Or does the receiver recognize them as such and treat them as for photos only?

I'm thinking this could be a faster replacement for HDDs for things needed only in the short term, or for greatly reduced physical storage space.

 

[n0qcu]

I believe the Dish DVRs require a minimum EHD size of 40 or 50 GB. We can now buy thumb drives of 256GB and maybe larger. Has anyone tried to use such thumb drives? Or does the receiver recognize them as such and treat them as for photos only?
Yes, they work. I have a 64GB flash drive with season 8 of 24 on it. It just takes a little longer for the VIP receiver to recognize as a drive than a normal HDD.
I'm thinking this could be a faster replacement for HDDs for things needed only in the short term, or for greatly reduced physical storage space.

.

 

[navychop]

Once it does, do transfers go quicker?

 

[harshness]

Once it does, do transfers go quicker?

That would depend greatly on the transfer speed of the thumb drive.

I have yet to see a thumb drive that yields anywhere near the speed of the recent USB hard drives. The fastest reads I've seen have been in the neighborhood of 25MB/sec. A late model cheap hard drive probably runs around 30MB/second and costs less than 1/3 as much.

The other issue is that the write speed of a thumb drive is typically much different than the read speed so there's a good chance that one way is quick and the other way is relatively slow.

 

[navychop]

Thank you. I should have thought this thru more. I'm not sure I'd want to rely upon a thumb drive for long term storage, either. They seem to be making them awfully cheap awfully fast.