You know I'm a little new to the whole dvr scene, but I'm really amazed that the one thing that really bugs me the most, is never talked about. With all the problems with these junk units DTV is "leasing" why does everyone seem to accept the fact that if there is a problem where you need to reformat or replace your unit, there is NO WAY to backup all of our time consuming and sometimes irreplaceable recordings? I just love it when the tech says "just reformat and that MIGHT fix the problem". Ummm ya just what I want to do...spend 70 hours of my time making recordings of shows just to errase all of them...
I also love when I complain about the cost of the HD DVR and the rep tells me that I'm getting a real DEAL on the unit since it costs thousands of dollars to produce... ya it costs big money because there's $800.00 worth of useless, usb, IEE1394, SATA, and ethernet ports on it that are totally unusable..
Why don't they make it so I can attach an external hard drive to it and backup my recordings so when I reformat it I can just copy my stuff back on it?
The SATA port is enabled but not officially supported. If you attach a Seagate Freeagent Pro 750gb drive via eSata cable it will switch from the internal drive and ONLY use the external with 3 times the capacity. If you later disconnect the external is will switch back to the internal with whatever recording are there still playable. Unfortunately the external drive is keyed to the DVR, ie, if you swap out for a new unit the recording on the external are no playable from the new unit. If they were to remove that restriction if would allow swapping out the DVR and retaining your recordings.
The reason TOYSMOST as to why, "everyone seem to accept the fact that if there is a problem where you need to reformat or replace your unit" is because most contributers to this site are more concerned about how many ports/cables/gb, etc., etc., etc., can dance on the head of a pin than to do anything constructive to solving this problem at the source...which, of course, is DirecTV. That's why "planning" will always be much more popular than "implementation".
So let me make sure that I have this correct. The only drive it will currently accept is an SATA drive and NOT a USB drive. I had one tech tell me that the USB ports were not plugged into the motherboard. I haven't opened mine up yet. It would be sweet if USB drives could be used - they're dirt cheap right now. Fryes has 500G USB stand alone drives for 119 bucks. 1 terabyte for 399.00. The tech also said that they have no plans, to his knowledge, to activate the USB drive.
I'm sure the reason they use the ESATA port is that it has a much faster transfer rate than USB2. There have been many PC tests on this with the results showing ESATA being 2 to 3 times faster. Since HD is a high bandwidth creature, USB might choke under these conditions.
FYI - My Seagate FreeAgent 750gb ESATA drive has been purring for a month now on my HR20 with no problems whatsoever.
I just purchased the 750GB FreeAgent Pro at Fry's open box. It did not come with a SATA cable, but it is for usb/sata and it has a SATA connector on the drive. Should a cable have come with it? And is any setup necessary? You may contact me at [email protected].
I just purchased the 750GB FreeAgent Pro at Fry's open box. It did not come with a SATA cable, but it is for usb/sata and it has a SATA connector on the drive. Should a cable have come with it? And is any setup necessary? You may contact me at [email protected].
Dave
They don't come with the eSATA cable, you will need to get one. I got the cable from www.monoprice.com for $3.50 (Product number 2882). Other places seem to charge much more. I actually bought 4 to make it worthwhile for a total of $18.60 including shipping. It will require you to cut a little of the rubber off of the cable end that goes into the drive so the cable will seat correctly. If you don't, the shoulder of the connector can't seat in all the way and will have an intermittant connection.
Pete
A simple external drive solution that doesn't void the warranty is excellent news!
I have some questions about how this works in practice. When I upgraded my DirecTV TiVo Sony T60 to a bajillion hours, the Now Playing catalog slowed down to a crawl. The way they had implemented the index was so slow at higher capacities, it required a separate RAM cache device (and associated constantly-overwritten-by-updates driver) to be efficient.
I was looking at some of the RAID-onboard enclosures that convert multiple drives into a single large LUN on a single eSATA channel (5TB<$200 for the enclosure!), but I'm afraid I'll just be turning my DVR into a turtle. I have just a few questions:
Does a H20-100 have a similar slow-down problem with expanded capacities, especially when using an external drive?
Does the R15 standard definition DirecTV DVR also have this capability?
I have used my HR20-700 with internal drive and with an external Seagate FreeAgent 750gb (with only 8% free space) and haven't noticed any slowdown. That's not to say there isn't any but it doesn't bother me if there is like it did on my old Tivo Series 1 mega upgrade. I don't hava an R15 but I went to the DirecTV site and looked in Customer Service/System Manuals (a great resource) and the picture of the back of the unit does not show an ESATA connector.
Pete
Very cool. Thanks for the info. I've got one HR20 getting installed tomorrow and another one coming in a month. I'm already shopping for an expansion!
You are correct - there is no eSATA port on the back of this unit. There is what appears to be a firewire port on the front - is this implemented as a drive interface?
I wouldn't think a firewire port would be over-saturated by the older video standards. The older standard is 480x480 before it's converted to the 352X240 for NTSC. That'd require about 15MB/sec throughput, x3 for two tuners recording while watching another video. Providing the device caches well enough to avoid thrashing the harddrive on the back end, a firewire would handle that much IO.
Has anyone tried plugging a drive into this front port?
Referring back to the same system manual mentioned before, it says the port on the front behind the door is a USB as is the one on the back. I doubt it has been enabled for an external drive. Throughput on a USB port is about one third that of an ESATA port.
Pete
No you're not correct - both of my HR20-700 and HR20-100S both have eSATA ports on the rear. If you are using a Seagate FreeAgent 750G drive you will have to purchase an eSATA to eSATA cable as it it not supplied with the unit. They are about 10 bucks at Fryes. Do not buy a SATA to eSATA cable. Even though that rear port is marked SATA it is an eSATA receptacle.
There is no firewire and the USB port has no drivers installed. One tech told me that they weren't even plugged into the motherboard but I didn't open it up so I can't confirm that. The CAT5 port is not functional at this time either. I can only guess that the USB port might be used for some kind of external controller in the future.
No you're not correct - both of my HR20-700 and HR20-100S both have eSATA ports on the rear.
The CAT5 port is not functional at this time either .
If you read the thread more carefully you will see he was talking about the R15, which does NOT have an ESATA port.
And the "Cat5 port" better known as an RJ45 is definitely enabled on the HR20-700. That is how mine connects to "phone home" to DirecTV. I have mine patch cabled to one of my local network hubs. To setup this port go to Menu-> Help & Settings-> Setup->Network. You can also test the connection there. The confirmation that it is working is listed under Info & Test with both "Network" and "Internet" showing "Connected".
And you can get the eSATA cable from www.monoprice.com (part# 2882) for only $3.50 each. I got 4 including shipping for $18.60 total.
Pete
Missed the H15. So you're tying up a RJ45 for the telephone on your LAN? I wish I had the luxury of more ports in my theater. Unfortunately i only installed 2 from my router and the reciever uses one of them.
What I meant by "functional" is that there has been discussions about making streaming video available from devices like Blu Ray players on your LAN so you can view videos on your computer. I can view videos on my receiver from other computer's on my LAN as well as WAN.
I'm not really tying up anything on my LAN. It's connected to a 10/100 4-port switch connected to my main 10/100 24-port switch. Rumors are that the new Video on Demand feature from DirecTV will be via broadband so I figured I'd be ready with the DSL hookup to the RJ45 port in case they enable that route.
Pete
Easy solution - Dump DirecTV and switch to DishNet. USB port now enabled for 39 bucks and you can add at least 750 gigs of hard drive storage. Then, the only problem you'll have is: how do I rip the programs from the HDD unto my computer and then burn them onto DVDs.......but one of these days, someone will write that program and then this will all be an unhappy memory of the past......
Easy solution - Dump DirecTV and switch to DishNet. USB port now enabled for 39 bucks and you can add at least 750 gigs of hard drive storage.
Why would I do that when my HR15-700 has it's eSATA port enabled for free and I already have a 750gb already attached. Besides eSATA is 2-3 times faster than USB.
Pete
I've been watching this post with interest, as I just got an HR20-700. I have a question, can you use more than one extra drive? By that I mean have two extra drives when one fills switch to the next one, or will you not be able to replay off the first extra drive when it is reconnected. Thanks
