FEATURE REQUEST: Hard drive capacity upgrade

[krt]

Would it be possible to expand the hard disk capacity on the 921?

If an end user hard drive upgrade is not feasable, would Dish be willing to provide a 921 hard disk capacity upgrade option in the near future?

Thanks.

[scottchez]

REQ: an internal 2nd drive upgrade option (the case looks big enough for a 2nd Hard Drive).

Dish would sell the upgrade Kit, Customers would open the box and simply just plug in the cable. The drive would then "marry" itself to the box.

Just like upgrading a computer.

[Tool408]

Do we know the size of the 921 hard drive?

:confused:
:nono2:

[tnsprin]

right from the brochure

• DVR capabilites:
• 250 GB hard disk drive for 100% digital
recording: up to 180 hours of SD programming, up
to 25 hours of HD programming, or a combination
of the two.

[Allen Noland]

I would like to see Dish support some sort of Firewire based Hard drive or BlueRay HD DVD Recorder. Just something that if I get behind on watching recorded HD content, I can move it off to a second device until I have a chance to catch up.

Thanks

[David_Levin]

Any of the above would be great (I just hope Dish is listening).

TiVo (if it's like the prior models) will support a hard drive upgrade (well - at least they don't PURPOUSFULLY PREVENT it).

E* may NEVER authorize you to open up the box. I'd be pretty happy with a way to off-load (and watch) recordings from an external firewire hard drive. It doesn't need to be merged with the capacity of the internal drive. E* COULD TRUMP TIVO WITH A SUPPORTED CAPACITY EXPANSION OPTION.

They are worried about data security. So, leave the data on the hard drive encrypted (it's probably encrypted on the internal drive as well - like the 721). If we can legally off load to D-VHS, we should be able to do the same with an external hard drive.

[Neil Derryberry]

Watch it on the discussion, guys.. discussions need to be held in the proper forum.

[DonLandis]

This is a long range request to be considered after the bulk of 921's are in place and mostly debugged with the Dishwire active.

What I believe will be the next major need on the 921 after DVHS connection is active is for a second user installable hard drive. I know there is an expansion bay in the front for this but I don't really know how you plan to implement this in software for access so I will make some overall suggestions for future consideration-

It would be nice if the second hard drive were easily swappable such as a hard drive in a drawer. These are currently made and work quite well on computers. The drawer kit could be sold by Dish Network as an accessory and be dealer installed or user installed if qualified. Should be no more difficult than installing a set of rails for the drawer as in the product Mobile Rack. The hard drive would need to meet specs defined by DishNetwork and be available through the Dish dealer or purchased from ones own source. This way one could swap out the second hard drive during a power off mode and be ready with more capacity. The drives could be coded/ married to the particular 921 and be such that all content is not readable on a computer. This way the video on them would remain secure.

Not saying this needs immediate attention but I see it becoming an important need for 921 users who wish to maintain more recorded programming without DVHS archiving.

[Kagato]

Since it has USB (most likely USB 2.0) I'd like to see USB external HD functionality. I was told by Advanced Tech Support that the 721 does see USB HDs (since the functionality is built into the Linux Kernel). It wasn't a big deal for the 721, it had a lot of space already, but the 921 needs some help with the size of HD content.

[TVBob]

Since it has USB (most likely USB 2.0) I'd like to see USB external HD functionality. I was told by Advanced Tech Support that the 721 does see USB HDs (since the functionality is built into the Linux Kernel).

I agree, there are dozens of external USB 2.0 hard drives on the market, and it should be easy for any consumer to just plug one into the DVR-921 and have it work right away.

But the hard part from an engineering standpoint is: what happens when the extra drive gets "unplugged?" Recordings that are "off line" could be displayed in a different color I guess.

But what happens if you are recording to the external drive while it gets unplugged or powered off? The DVR-921 would have to recover gracefully.

How well does Linux handle hot plugging and hot unplugging of external USB file systems?

[Kagato]

....

But what happens if you are recording to the external drive while it gets unplugged or powered off? The DVR-921 would have to recover gracefully.

How well does Linux handle hot plugging and hot unplugging of external USB file systems?

The OS itself won't have much of an issue as far as crashing. I expect the OS would get pegged for about 30 seconds while it retries making the connection. Afterall you've got some serious data you're tossing at the interface. But yeah, there are some good chunks of devel work needed to pull this off.

[DonLandis]

I forgot about the USB port on the 921. I was told that would be for external keyboard support and I recall seeing it in the menus, Mark posted. I have a couple of USB 2.0 drives here to try when the 921 arrives. ???? Thanks for the suggestion!

I would be concerned at how Linux deals with separate drives. I don't know that much about Linux but windows, you beed to address the drive by a letter to locate files right? How would Linux know to go to the USB or any other drive for that matter without it being handled in the application?

[bytre]

The application would certainly need to know how to handle the additional drive space. Linux doesn't map a drive quite like Windows, but there are some similarities - the device would be something like /dev/sda1 and the application would need to have the awareness to start writing data to that additional drive. I would think that there would need to be some UI associated with it to allow a user to archive recorded programs off to the other drive.

I mailed Mark a USB 2.0 drive to try plugging in to his 921. I don't have many expectations though.

[Mike Richardson]

Also remember that the USB 2.0 drive would need to be high performance, because at any one time, it could possibly be writing 2 HD streams AND reading an HD stream! That's a lot of work.

[Kagato]

I doubt much will happen when the drive it plugged in.

The problem is several things need to happen in order for an app to use the drive. The Linux Kernel will see the USB drive automagically. BUT, the HD still has to be formated with whatever filesystem Dish decided to use for archiving video, and finally that file system has to be mounted into the filesystem. (Although Automounting is a comon feature in Linux formating usually has some level of scripting/user interaction).

There are two ways Dish could go about expanding the HD. Depending on what type of file system they used it may be possible to simply set up a striped filesystem (Software Raid) that spans several drives. The plus side of this is it distributes IO, and is a transparent way of expanding space. The App would never know it was multiple drives and it could all be done in a fairly small Bash script at boot time. The down side is if any drive were removed/fail you'd have to rebuild the FS, basically losing all programming.

The second is changing the app the reconize a second drive. Add a UI to confirm format, so additional code to manage multiple drives and what to do if one is removed/fails. Not a huge ammount of Devel, but a fair amount.

[DonLandis]

The down side is if any drive were removed/fail you'd have to rebuild the FS, basically losing all programming.


Does that also include the OS from the first drive? That would be disasterous but the concept is nice. I think your second approach is the best,safest way.

[Kagato]

Does that also include the OS from the first drive? That would be disasterous but the concept is nice. I think your second approach is the best,safest way.

Usually not. You can have multiple file systems (of different formats) partinioned on a hard drive. So I would assume that core OS directories (/var, /usr, /etc, /root, /home) would be seperate from whatever file system the encrypted transport stream is stored on.

I would point out that both Dish (and Tivo) do this primitive "self healing" bit where the hard drive is totally reformated/reimaged when critical errors are encountered. In fact with Tivo once you mate together a second hard drive you cannot remove that drive with out totally starting out from scratch.

So, if dish were to seriously look at this as a feature; having it reformat the data filesystems when an error is encountered is not unheard of. Now, if they wanted to go a little father a simple simple confirm screen "Data Drive Error Detected: Reimage File System (You will lose all programming and timers) [Okay] [Shutdown]" might be nice.

Then if all that happened was a wire came lose you could reconnect it and restart and move on.

[MikeSoltis]

Also remember that the USB 2.0 drive would need to be high performance, because at any one time, it could possibly be writing 2 HD streams AND reading an HD stream! That's a lot of work.

Well, my thoughts are that if the system detected an external HDD connected, to allow its use only for archiving (copy to) or restoring (copy from). That way you wouldn't have to integrate it so much into the operation, just add a couple of access functions.

They could also add an option to archive the OS in case of an internal HDD failure (which almost never happens :rolleyes: )