Seagate's new DVR hard drives

[Pete38]

Hi all,

Seagate says that their new hard drives, announced yesterday, are designed specifically for DVRs. Could E* be looking at a hardware change in the 921 this late in the development cycle?

"Seagate said the new drives, which include up to 160-Gbytes of total capacity, are being shipped to eight consumer electronics manufacturers: Toshiba, Thomson, Sony, Pioneer, Pace, Nokia, Motorola and Echostar."

Entire article here:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1233698,00.asp

Pete

[Bob Haller]

Has to be a improvement over the existing drives, they fail constantly. Might explain some of the latest delays too..

[Jacob S]

I wonder if you could still use them for a PC then and how much these would cost? Sounds promising.

[Ron Barry]

I am not sure if this would explain the delays. My guess would be the delay would be more do to software related issues. As for using them in a PC. I have a feeling that you might be able to but would not want to. From what I read it looks like they removed the error detection and correction piece of the drive. No need to do that when reading video back. Based on that piece of info I would not suggest this device for PC use unless you were using it as a temp drive or a video drive.

Obviously the DVR market has some growth potential to warrent the investment .

[DarrellP]

160 GB is not big enough for the 921. I thought it was spec'd out at 200 GB?

[Bill R]

160 GB is not big enough for the 921. I thought it was spec'd out at 200 GB?
You are correct.

My guess is that DISH is looking at the new Seagate drive for some future DVR product.

[Peluso]

Makes me wonder if Dish has a single code base for every DVR, or do they build from the ground up for every different hardware implementation.

[Jacob S]

Perhaps as the delays continue for the 921 so does the changes in technology as it also continues therefore needing to plan on a larger hard drive for the 921.

[Peluso]

no, the HDD is a passive component in the system. The difference in size or make shouldn't matter all that much. I would guess it'll be easy to drop in an even larger HD when folks start hacking the 921 and bigger drives become available.

[P Smith]

I am not sure if this would explain the delays. My guess would be the delay would be more do to software related issues. As for using them in a PC. I have a feeling that you might be able to but would not want to. From what I read it looks like they removed the error detection and correction piece of the drive. No need to do that when reading video back. Based on that piece of info I would not suggest this device for PC use unless you were using it as a temp drive or a video drive.

Obviously the DVR market has some growth potential to warrent the investment .

Removing error detection and correction is nonsense for any HDD !
Particulary for PVRs/DVRs what keeps on the disks not just video recordings but system files and swap partition !

[Jacob S]

If someone were to spend a grand on a DVR/VOD receiver it should be made upgradable just as an expensive computer would be, since it is such a large investment. This would be whether it comes to memory expansion or to getting a bigger hard drive. They should have some slots for upgraded memory later or some inputs for upgrades to connect an external hard drive to and memory. This would help a bit.

This reminds me, whatever happened to Dish's idea of adding external cd-rw, dvd-rw, etc. to the DVR's? I thought it was mentioned that they was going to make these receivers able to do this in the future with a serial or other connection.

[toad57]

Removing error detection and correction is nonsense for any HDD !
Particulary for PVRs/DVRs what keeps on the disks not just video recordings but system files and swap partition !

Maybe they are going to let the DVR OS take care of that... yea, sounds like a step backwards...

[P Smith]

Maybe they are going to let the DVR OS take care of that... yea, sounds like a step backwards...
It's NEVER happen ! NONSENSE !!!