3TB and 4TB Drives. The Danger!

Yup....but this would have worked too...



Danger...danger....danger....

 

That's an interesting story. I had always assumed that the lack of interest in external drives was caused by MRV...why attach another drive when (for roughly the same price) you can have another DVR instead of a basic receiver in the bedroom, double your disk space, gain an extra couple of recording tuners and still watch where you want. If people aren't using MRV, I don't know how they manage the limited diskspace, particularly on the HR20 and HR21 models.

 

In all (or at least most) of these cases, it was the receiver that failed and not the hard drive?

 

True, but I was mostly focused on his flame of $99 HDDs and cheap cables.

The only enclosure I've had fail was my original Free Agent Pro when we first got eSATA. That wasn't the enclosure even, it was the power supply.

 

Oh, when it failed I pulled the drive out and put it in another enclosure and had no problems. Shortly thereafter I swapped that drive (750G) for 1TB using the xfsdump/xfsrestore method.

Same here. They are the same quality as the cables inside the DVRs so I'm not sure why someone would think those cables would be worse than what's inside. *shrug*

I can't really comment on price, I get my drives at cost. However prices have come back down and stock has caught back up. Newegg had 2TB drives last week for $99. Those $99 drives are of the same, or better, quality so again not sure why someone would think the drives we buy would be worse.

 

I think it saves DirecTv a ton of money. Because all your recordings are locked away and tied to a specific DVR, the last thing you ever want to do is upgrade that DVR, or swap it out. You can't just swap DVRs or even service, you have to run the old side by side with the new until you've watched enough of your backlog to let it go.

If you've been archiving shows, you're just out of luck.

 

The fact is there isn't a demand because your average consumer just doesn't need it. If HD storage space was a primary driver of consumers needs for a DVR then cable companies would have increased their HD years ago.

This board is full of power users and even here only a small % use them. I'd be interested to see what % of DISH subs use this feature and it has everything that people here are asking for. I still bet it's a small % of DVR users that have the ability to do so.

 

That's an interesting point. I'm going through that right now. I've been debating an upgrade to an HR-34, but didn't want to deal with losing the programming that I already have. Recently, I did a system test on my HR-20, and it's telling me that I have a hard drive problem and that I should call DirecTV.

Because it looks like I may need to replace my HR-20 anyway, now I'm back thinking about getting an HR-34. I'm actively trying to watch everything that's already recorded on the HR-20 and am shifting as many of the "season passes" that are currently on the HR-20 off to my other DVR's, so that when I finally do upgrade, I'm not going to lose anything that I care about.

 

Perhaps you can explain the savings? If a customer orders another receiver and then pays the additional TV fee on it until they're done watching it then they would make money.

If you ordered the HR34 and had it installed how long would it take you to watch the stuff on there? 3 months of an additional TV fee is $18.

 

Darn it! I just screwed up my post... :lol:

 

Now that is just plain.... !rolling

Mrs HDTVFan must have some of the same DNA in terms of that trait. :lol:

 

I just don't thin the majority of people understand the concept of recording everything and watching latter, much less the need for more space if they are coming from cable where they had maybe 20 hours of recording space an snow have four or five times that.

People often don't get these concepts unless they. Are explained to them in a store or in their home by someone else who gets it.

 

Since we are talking about low consumer demand, why did the 2GB limit get removed for the HR34? If the logic is that DTV never does something unless there is a lot of demand then that change would never have been made. I've never met a Product Manager yet that was in favor of spending any time/money on upgrading core technology just to stay current with technology trends.

It sure wasn't done to make the few external storage geeks happy since it's not supported at all.

That means that larger internal storage is coming - because there is demand for it. It's a duh moment for a device marketed as a "Home Media Server".

The gist of this thread, whether internal or external storage, is that as the capacity rises people will be utilizing it and the reaction to a device failure is going to be hotter.

I'm sure the average consumer has not a care in the world about RAID storage either. They don't even have a clue that such a thing is available. But I would be surprised if any consumer was happy about a DTV DVR failure! If they were aware that technology existed that prevented loss from a drive failure they would WANT IT. Likewise if they knew their programming could be easily transferred if the box died, they would WANT IT. Neither of these is difficult.

What is a moderate irritation today is going to be a whole world of hurt when an "average consumer" finds out that >2TB of programming for their entire household is GONE.

It's just lame that a "Home Media Server" was even brought to market without both of these issues being addressed. It should have had at least 2 (RAID1) "storage cartridges" (ie consumer removable disk magazines). If Joe Consumer (and Joe Installer) can handle inserting and removing CDs and DVDs they can sure handle a disk cartridge. I can recall my 5-year-old son swapping Nintendo cartridges!

The obvious solution now is for DTV to come out with an HR34 model without internal storage and sell something similar to a TenBox (only with removable drives). And fix the program locking.

The extra cost always comes up when talking about RAID. It's a short-sighted perspective. How much programming is recorded on your DVR that you haven't watched yet? How much is it worth to you - or more like how much did you already pay for it? And how much of it won't be rebroadcast anytime soon? It doesn't take long before the insurance offered by RAID is dirt cheap. For me, I've had 2 drives fail in the last 5 years. The programming that was saved, not to mention the aggravation avoided, was easily worth the expense of RAID.

 

I have a question I have a WD 1TB EHD that I had for a year and never had any problems with it, but one time will I was moving stuff around and i accidentally bump the external and fell but not too badly, and when i hooked it back up again I didn't think much of it until recently having picture freezing occasionally and the DVR won't respond and to had to reset and DVR would all of a sudden won't recognize the EHD and heard which sounded like a clicking sounds repeatedly from EHD,and all of a sudden started to work again and the clicking sound disappeared and started to spin normally and DVR recognized it again, is this a sign of EHD failing?