A few weeks ago I hooked up 2Tb of external storage (WD HDD and Thermaltake enclosure) for my HR24. As I already only have 40% left, I'm wondering if I can expand my storage further without buying another 2Tb drive and enclosure and going thru the powerdown, swap, and bootup routine. Can a RAID enclosure with multiple drives be utilized, using the RAID controller to switch between the drives without going thru the old swap routine? In short, what are the alternatives to having to catalogue a collection of 2Tb drives?
How to get >2Tb storage??
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I don't think you have many options. RAID 0 would increase capacity, but if you lose one drive, you lose all data. I don't think there are any economical ways to get RAID5, plus the 2TB limit would still apply.
Swapping drives, you'd have to keep the Series links and such current on both drives.
Sounds like you've done a lot of recording in a few weeks. I thought a 2TB should be able to handle more than 400 hours of MPEG4 HD.
Swapping drives, you'd have to keep the Series links and such current on both drives.
Sounds like you've done a lot of recording in a few weeks. I thought a 2TB should be able to handle more than 400 hours of MPEG4 HD.
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Here is the Calulation of how many hours of MPEG-4 HD I can Record on my 2 TB HR23-700 which is 528 hours.
Subtract 100 Gb from the drive size (2000 Gb) for housekeeping space reserved by DirecTV.
HD MPEG-4 uses ~ 3.6 GB/hour (or 180 GB for 50 hours).
2000 Gb minus 100 Gb = 1900. 1900 Gb/3.6 Gb per hour = 528 hours of MPEG-4 HD Recording Capacity.
1 TB = 250 hours of MPEG-4 Recording Capacity.
2 TB = 528 hours of MPEG-4 Recording Capacity.
Listen to Mr P. Smith if you want to know the Truth.
If not just continue to GUESS!!! :lol:
Subtract 100 Gb from the drive size (2000 Gb) for housekeeping space reserved by DirecTV.
HD MPEG-4 uses ~ 3.6 GB/hour (or 180 GB for 50 hours).
2000 Gb minus 100 Gb = 1900. 1900 Gb/3.6 Gb per hour = 528 hours of MPEG-4 HD Recording Capacity.
1 TB = 250 hours of MPEG-4 Recording Capacity.
2 TB = 528 hours of MPEG-4 Recording Capacity.
I guess you have No Clue about what you are talking about!xzi said:
Listen to Mr P. Smith if you want to know the Truth.
If not just continue to GUESS!!! :lol:
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For all practical purposes, if you want more than 2TB of storage at any given time, you need to do that via multiple DVRs, each with 2TB. Using whole-home you can then view any recording from any DVR. You can't get more than 2 TB on any individual DVR, as others have noted.
If you have multiple e-SATA drives, you could swap back and forth between them on a given DVR, but that is awkward at best. Also as noted, recordings can only be played back on the DVR they were originally recorded on (i.e., the disk drive can't be moved from DVR to DVR).
If you have multiple e-SATA drives, you could swap back and forth between them on a given DVR, but that is awkward at best. Also as noted, recordings can only be played back on the DVR they were originally recorded on (i.e., the disk drive can't be moved from DVR to DVR).
So the movies I've got on my external are encoded so that only that particular receiver and no other can play them? If my receiver was stolen, for instance, I'd have a 2Tb drive full of essentially useless data? Guess this also means I couldn't plug the drive into a PC or anything else and be able to access the data (or would a PC even read the drive, since it was automatically formatted by the HR24)? Does this have to do more with encoding or the file system (or both)? This would also explain why data on my internal drive can't be transferred, correct?davring said:
Sorry for all the questions, but I'm still trying to get a grasp on the basics...
Yes, I'm basically recording 24/7, often 2 films at once. I got 118 movies off the internal 500 Gb drive, so I figured I'd probably get maybe 480 off the 2 Tb... I originally had grand plans for a huge movie collection, but if anything happens to my HR24, I guess I'm SOL! Also, if a HDD went bad, I'd lose 480 movies... Yikes - kinda risky to build a large collection this way, eh?dpeters11 said:
I guess no amount of wizardry would enable one to play a drive on any other DVR - the movie studios are doing their best to sell DVDs, as seemingly this would be the only way to build a large collection (unless you had a timeless receiver that would never fail or become obsolete!)...Davenlr said:
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There's nothing we as end users could do to make them play on another dvr and any discussion of it would be against the board policies as dbstalk doesn't support breaking your agreement with the provider but you are ultimately right. Things are setup this way by directv to keep the content distributors happy.
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Perhaps you come to late to the aspect ... the factor mentioned so many times here ... well, just for you: ENCRYPTED.mreg376 said:Or if you could figure out exactly which component in a DVR identifies it to the hard drive...and then transplant it.
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Well, you can always get a HD capture device, and instead of recording the movies to your DVR, you could record them to your computer, and then burn the file to a DVD. That is about the only current way of archiving movies from DirecTv without using their equipment and restrictions.trstew said:
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