721 Hard Drive Upgrade

[Kagato]

I've heard a from a source inside Dish today and came across a couple things:

1) Hard Drive is Maxtor (Not exactly surprising.)

2) The 721 will see a USB hard drive. Okay now that surprises me, but hey, sounds like a good way of keeping people from cracking the case. But I'm a little suspicious of this actually being true.

And for that matter 90 hours like enough for now. Anyone want to test this out? Sounds like a nice non-evasive test.

[Mark Lamutt]

The 721 won't currently see *anything* USB because the USB ports aren't yet enabled. This according to our very own 721 guru, Scott Greczkowski, when he tried to plug in a USB keyboard.

[DRJDAN]

Are the USB ports 1.1 or 2.0?

If they are 1.1, the speed will too slow for a hard drive receiving video.

[Jacob S]

Couldnt we activate the ports ourself? Why not, we paid for the hardware.

[Kagato]

Mark> I understand where you're comming from. And I'm a bit doubtful about this myself, but in Linux there are two parts to using USB. First enabling the Port, the second is enabling the device subset.

As it stands, just compiling the USB support into the kernal means the computer only sees simple USB Hubs. In order for keyboards to work you need to enable as a module or compile into the kernal "USB Human Interface Device (HID) support". In order to support Hard Drives you need "USB Mass Storage support".

So basically just because the keyboard doesn't work doesn't mean the port isn't enabled. The port might not be enabled, or it just might not have keyboard support added. OR even more evil is they've modified the support to only reconize HID Descriptors that match E* products. (I hope I didn't just give them an idea.)

Tons of good USB info is at www.linux-usb.org. Of course a lot of the info is kernal version specific, and we don't know what kernal is runs...yet... YMMV