when will the 6 tuner hopper come out? I hope "SOON" for real.
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For now, yes. If you have unusual recording needs, buy a 3rd Hopper. Must go thru Executive Resolutions for that, last I heard.
It seems like I remember Scott posting a percentage a while back ago somewhere around here... Can't remember at all what it is or where the post is... I agree on the multiple standard Hopper proposition... I work with computers everyday... If there's one thing I know it's that the more redundancy, the better!
You can sub the 3.5 7200 drives with either SSD or drives w/ either 10 or 15k rpm (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236243). You can also go with 3 and 4 terabyte 7200 hard drives as well (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145562). With that said, I believe Dish should make a 6-8 tuner Hopper and make the proper changes. Force the competition to play catch-up. The install base is bigger than you realize. As stated previous, My family has said no to the hopper right now because it has too few tuners for our home.
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. . . And the lower cost of manufacture and better economies. Let's face it, DirecTV is a good service and company and their 5 tuner DVR solutions were tempting, but Charles Ergen is the Spreadsheet King and teaches all his competitors about economies. Of course Direct would be going the 3 tuner route--for the same reasons Dish went down that road to begin with.
.I don't thin Dish would ever go a 6 tuner route, but it cold allow the option of a truly integrated 2 Hopper system (they could get some money for the 2nd Hopper) as was originally designed. Most likely as an option from the menu as to how the subscribers wants the system to behave: as a 2 Hopper, 6 tuner system with "one DVR" for all or one can select the current limited integration. This gives the consumer choice and considering they had the software designed for full integration to begin with, this should NOT be a difficult feature to add.
depends, if thats your only unit sure
but a genie can be integrated into an existing system and add to its tuners
6 or 9 sat tuners isn't enough for you? And that isn't even including PTAT.
I'd MUCH rather have the redundancy 2 or 3 Hoppers offer, especially if fully integrated, than a single point of failure. If SWMBO ain't happy, ain't NOBODY happy. And I think most customers, upon reflection, would rather have the redundancy, and the market for one or two 6 sat tuner boxes becomes vanishingly small.
Yes you can go with larger drives, but the incremental costs added to the units could well place the price for production too high.
@7200 RPM
2TB $100
3TB $150
4TB $250
10K and 15K drives are significantly more expensive and there's additional heat dissipation to consider.
@10K RPM
1 TB $290
@15K RPM
600GB $300
SSD option:
1 TB $2484
It's fine to believe that Dish could come out with a 6 tuner hopper but the storage costs alone make it unrealistic IMO. Sure, there would be some price breaks versus buying 1-off but they aren't that significant because HDD and SSD are commoditized items.
I could see a Master/Slave combination of 2 hoppers as tenable, but I don't see the financial aspects of delivering a 6 tuner box as tenable.
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I don't think drive speeds are a limiting factor. The three tuner hopper is already handling 6 record streams and 4+ playback streams during PTAT. I don't think two or three additional 8mbps record streams are going to break it.
Getting a single cable solution to a six tuner box is more of an impediment. They have to develop a switch/node solution to send a single transponder down the pipe vs half the satellite. It can be done, D* has SWM, but I don't know if there is a deeper technical nuance why Dish hasn't done it yet. Seems the install savings alone would pay for the development.
Getting a single cable solution to a six tuner box is more of an impediment. They have to develop a switch/node solution to send a single transponder down the pipe vs half the satellite. It can be done, D* has SWM, but I don't know if there is a deeper technical nuance why Dish hasn't done it yet. Seems the install savings alone would pay for the development.
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The 3 tuner hopper is handling (at most) 3 streams. PTAT records the entire transponder instead of parsing out the channel from the transponder. It parses the channel you want to watch from the raw TP mux at playback.
I am not talking about bandwidth here either, I'm talking about randomization of the I/O. You're writing to 3 locations and if you aren't playing back from the current live stream that's even more randomization. Within a given stream it won't be random, but when you start making more and more requests, the drive spends a long time seeking. This can be optimized to an extent with NCQ, but once you reach a certain threshold of outstanding IO requests, that isn't as much help.
Double the number of possible write streams and you negatively impact the ability to keep up with the work load. There are things that could be done, such as adding additional drives onto the system, but that introduces risk as well. There's actually something to be said for having a pair of drives so that if the OS becomes corrupt on one, you can boot and run from the other.
We haven't even discussed the "all the eggs in 1 basket" aspect of these either. Lose the 6 tuner box, lose everything.
Perhaps a VIP series splitter would work. I'm not as well versed on the signal delivery side of things.
at that point, i would just get 2 or maybe even 3 hoppers (if i was really looking for redundancy).
I'm not seeing too many threads about dead hoppers, so i'd say a 2 hopper household is plenty redundant to keep your TV alive.
I just responded in the other thread http://www.satelliteguys.us/threads/294056-PTAT-question?p=2999958#post2999958 why I don't think they are storing a single stream for the whole transponder.
Even with a 6 tuner box you'd only be serving about 100mbps combined read/write requests for 10-12 "clients." I was putting single disk servers into production doing more work than that 10 years ago with less capable hardware.
No, that functionality is already built-in to the Hopper. The current switch technology sends all the even or all the odd transponders for a sat to a tuner, even though the tuner really only needs a single transponder at a time. There is not enough bandwidth in the cable to stack six tuners that way. They would need to have switching smart enough to skinny it down to a single transponder per tuner, again much like D*'s SWM tech.
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