Questions about External Drives

[brucegrr]

I have several questions about external drives.

I am a long time Directv user, new convert to the Dish religion. :)

I have a VIP-612 DVR. I want to add an external drive.

1.) Are there any drives that I should absolutely stay away from?

2.) Is the maximum drive size 1tb?

3.) When an external drive is connected do I lose the internal drive capacity (like with Directv)?

4.) Are there any "gotchya's" when using an external drive?

Thanks for any help you can give. I am still in the process of learning how to use the DVR. After being with Directv for a long time, my brain thinks Directv. :)

Bruce

[RasputinAXP]

1. There are some drives that have a weird partition on them that prevents the DVR from formatting them. I don't recall which ones offhand.
2. 1 or 1.5TB, single spindle (no RAID0 external drives)
3. No, it's additional capacity
4. You can't record directly to the external, you can only move stuff out to it. Is that a gotcha? I don't think so, but some might.

[finniganps]

This has been discussed a lot on this forum. See http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=95896