external hard drive

[camp354]

Is it possible to hook up a external hard drive through the usb ports on the 721? im down to my last 25 hrs. and don't want to have to start erasing!

[Jason]

NO

[James_F]

Yea, you wish you could. :D

[Bill R]

I think the answer should be "not yet". I feel that it is just a matter of time before we see one for the 721.

[Bill D]

How quick would the external drive work through USB?? Would you notice any difference from an internal one.

[James_F]

You guys are dreaming. I doubt a USB hard drive could have enough bandwith to stream the video off of it to the TV, you might be able to store it, but no view it. I have a USB hard drive with my laptop and it has trouble with MP3s. :rolleyes:

Oh and there is the DMCA POS that might come up also. ;)

[gcutler]

USB 2.0 or 1.1 on the 721? If only USB 1.1 I agree with James_F. But if 2.0, USB 2.0 is supposedly same rate as Firewire (420 megabits/sec) What are chances that Charlie put more expensive USB 2.0 in 721??? :p

http://www.shortcourses.com/video/chapter08.htm#FireWire%20Speed

So according to this chart, USB 2.0 if as fast as Firewire is in the same range of SCSI-2 up to Wide Ultra SCSI.

But the biggest hurdle is getting it supported. Dish would open itself up to lawsuits by the Movie and TV makers if they allowed offloading of external drives. While taking the internal drive out could product same result, the removable drive would be tooo convenient to "Hackers" who want to extract the movies to AVI or MPG.

I'm debating getting a firewire drive since I put a FW card in all my machines, but otherwise I don't know anyone who has tested the ability to play files off of drive directly

[jeffwtux]

Don't you have to take out the HD from the 721 and install it as a sencondary drive in a desktop, and then from there carefully offload the movies to an external usb drive or DVD-RW?

[Chris Blount]

Just a friendly reminder about item "M" in our user agreement:

(m) Discussion about hacking into the content of Personal Video Recorders (PVR's) including digital transfer of undecoded programming from the PVR's hard drive to another medium is prohibited. However, discussion about upgrading the hard drive in a PVR is allowed.

We need to be careful about where this thread is going. Thanks!

[jeffwtux]

Chris:
So if you upgrade the HD, what are you allowed to do with the old HD? They can't force you to dispose it. That's a very blurry line they are trying to enforce

[James_F]

You can reformat it no problem, you just can't extract any data off of it. Now if I load the HD onto my computer and boot up into windows and browse the drive? I'd say that would be a no-no. Its a fine line, but for now its best to be careful.

[Kagato]

I have a conversation with the Advanced Tech Support people several months ago. They seemed to say that the 721 acutally sees external hard drives on USB. Which doesn't suprise me because it is a default option in most linux's out there. It's just the software doesn't write to them. They could write something to do it. But I'm doubting it will happen. At least not with the 921 in the pipe. Too many other more pressing issues at the moment.

[Jacob S]

One could create an external hard drive to where you can have the information sent to the hard drive through the usb port and sent back through with RCA jacks or coax connection.

[Bob Haller]

Well at minimum the ability to move stuff from one 721 to another would be a very useful addition.

[James_F]

Lets just focus on making these things run better. They still crash too often or have user interface problems.