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View Full Version : 722 & External storage- is this right?

Jason F
12-30-07, 10:12 PM
I just got back from a 10day trip to be with family for Christmas, to find my 722 on the blink. I've had it for right about 90days and both my wife & I love it, so we were quite sad to see no football today but instead watch the darn thing continually reboot itself spontaneously.

So I called tech support and they're replacing my 722 (yeah!), but I don't yet have the external disk part purchased or set up. I convinced them to give me free activation on the hard drive access, so that I can hopefully offload some or all of my programming as my new 722 gets shipped to me this week.

But, here is what I want to make sure I fully understand before I commit myself to the disk situation:

1. The drive that I chose to hook up to the 722 and format, is the only one that I can use with this receiver. If I try to use a 2nd drive, it won't work or it will make my first drive no longer accessible.

2. Once I hook a drive up to the 722 and set it up, if #1 is true, then I'm also locked in to the size of the hard drive I've got now- if I upgraded the disk inside the case down the road, the receiver would see this as a new drive and start all over making the old disk unusable. (which makes me think I should just get as large a drive as I can now)

3. I will be hopefully offloading all the programming from my current (read: dying) 722, and loading it on to the new 722 once it arrives- so that should be 1 transfer of the 3 transfers allowed between receivers, correct? So I'll still have 2 total transfers for the future if I understand correctly.

Thanks for your help guys. I would love to get a drive picked up in the next day or two and get everything backed up so that when the new receiver arrives I only have to set it up and download the shows to it, and hopefully be back up and running in as little time as possible.
P Smith
12-30-07, 11:48 PM
1. no
2. no
3. yes
ssmith10pn
12-31-07, 01:20 AM
1. no
2. no
3. yes


Yep that's pretty much it.

You can archive onto 3 different drives. It only gets tricky when you move to another DVR on your account. Thats where the limit of three swaps is at.

As far as swapping drives on and off of one DVR that is unlimited.

I recently moved all of my archive stuff from a 320 gig drive back to the DVR and then dumped it to a new 750 gig drive without a hiccup.
Jason F
12-31-07, 08:06 AM
Awesome! Thanks for the help and the clairification guys!!
Kent Taylor
12-31-07, 08:45 AM
You can archive onto 3 different drives.

Are you saying that there is a limit on the number of unique drives you can use on a single receiver? In other words, if I have five 320G drives and I want to use them to archive programming, I can only use three of the five?
Bill R
12-31-07, 08:58 AM
Are you saying that there is a limit on the number of unique drives you can use on a single receiver? In other words, if I have five 320G drives and I want to use them to archive programming, I can only use three of the five?

No, you can use as many drives as you want (one at a time). The number "three" comes into play when you talk about MOVING the drives to another receiver. That can only be done three times with the current software.
Kent Taylor
12-31-07, 09:02 AM
No, you can use as many drives as you want (one at a time). The number "three" comes into play when you talk about MOVING the drives to another receiver. That can only be done three times with the current software.

That was my understanding as well.
Thanks.
epontius
12-31-07, 12:08 PM
Hope you have better luck than I did. I enabled the external hd option (a quick phone call with an autobot). Bought a 500gb external drive and tried to offline some programing I had recorded, however the unit reboots so frequently that this is nearly impossible...and I'm not completely confident that the stuff it says has been archived is complete and not corrupted.

Erik
ssmith10pn
12-31-07, 05:28 PM
No, you can use as many drives as you want (one at a time). The number "three" comes into play when you talk about MOVING the drives to another receiver. That can only be done three times with the current software.

Yea I guess I didn't keep up.
When the activation was originally released they stated there was a 3 drive limit but apparently not.

http://www.dishnetwork.com/content/our_products/dish_hd/external_hd/ExternalHDDStorage.pdf
whatchel1
01-01-08, 01:56 PM
1 Have you done a hard reboot to see if the unit resets and stops the auto reboot?
2. Why would you transfer what you send to the HDD back to the VIP 722?