Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler External Hard Drive to HD DVR

Well this is a tech forum so rather than report what a great meal/family time we had at the Silver Fox (and Max really loved the T bone) or explore the philosophical question of why the Three Philosophers Belgian Ale we picked up at Whole Foods includes a blend of only two ales rather than three, and of course at the risk of presenting myself as even more like Job than recent history has proven to be the case, I submit for your/my edification the following situation: since TIVO came into play until September 2008 the only real indulgence I have allowed myself was a hard drive capacity upgrade so I could have up to 285 hours of DVR space to play with, whether in Ultimate TV, TIVO, or Directv modalities, all in SD. To me this was a killer or must have feature, because I like to watch TV yet have little time to do so, if weeks go by and I return to the mother ship to see what gives, I like to be able to watch whatever I want, especially if it turns out to be off season and there is nothing on and I have missed all the current episodes of my favorite selections.

So now, as time is an issue, even more so as I have additional toys regarding which I need to finalize payment, I definitely have desired an HD DVR with a high capacity (preferably approaching 300 hours, it's too hard to go back). My well-paid friend in this endeavor so far has been Weaknees; however, recently they have massively let me down, I am willing to pay for expertise but current products are not reliable, e.g., I purchased a Directv HR21 with a 1 TB internal Hard Drive upgrade from Weaknees that wasn't bad, but the capacity was insufficient, so when they released the supposedly ready for prime time (yes I'm so old I remember the phrase, the not ready for prime time players truly rocked) external 2 tb hard drive for the HR21-22, I talked them into upgrading me, that was my second mistake. Whereas the internal 1 tb drive was too small to keep me ahead of the curve with regard to HD recording, the external unit did not work, even though it is supposedly out of the beta phase.

With the external drive, every few seconds, the picture breaks ups, as can be seen here:



As opposed to here:



The unit was sent back and replaced, and Weaknees considers it one of their more successful offerings, dvr capacity upgrades are their main claim to fame, yet with no improvement.

I like Directv yet am hooked on high capacity hard drive space, 2 tb (240 hrs of HD recording) is really the minimum for me because I want to be able to forget about TV when I need to focus on work (most of the time) and conversely be able to watch more or less everything I missed when I have a moment and it turns out the ever shortening television seasons are once again on hiatus.

If anyone knows anything about external hard drives to HD DVRs (which ones work, what interferes with functionality) I would love to hear about it, at this point it seems to be almost an early adoption issue, and I almost never paint myself into that corner because I am too lazy to do the troubleshooting, however in this case I find myself stuck on the front lines because I really want the high capacity feature in HD.

Western Digital now has a 2tb drive on the market. I'm sure they'll start being offered by weakknees soon.

Wow, that's a lot of space. My HD Tivo is only 750GB.

From my experience, my suggestion is to stay away from Maxtor and any drives from LaCie. They have a short lifespan.

WD, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba are pretty safe bets.

I saw that drive and wondered if it might work, the CNET review states it's not the fastest, which might be an issue, given that some have reported that their external 1.5 tb drives have slowed down and frozen once they got filled up; however I suspect the problem I am experiencing may be somehow linked to the RAID 0 array in weaknees external enclosure which contains two 1tb drives, so I have begun to wonder if a single 2tb drive will eventually present a workable solution. They swear they worked out the bugs before going to market.

Using a RAID 0 for data that you consider critical -- as people who are particular about their recorded TV are wont to do -- isn't the best idea. If either of the hard drives fails, you lose everything. If you play the odds, your chances of data loss are twice that of just using a single drive.

It has the option of running it as RAID 1 but then of course you only have a 1tb capacity. Running it as RAID 1 could be a test at some point to see if I can at least make the unit work.

A RAID 1 2tb setup might be ideal if it was fast enough, where it wasn't frustrating waiting for the menus to load, etc.; however, I'm not all that concerned about losing everything because every time I've been forced to migrate that's happpened, and it's NBD to me. To me it's more about knowing that I don't need to check what's on with regard to current personal fav's before they disappear and even more that when I sit down to watch I'll have lots of choices, all commercial free.

says the guy who purchased an EP800 7.1 system with an A1400-8 amplifier.

Jason

Those were not indulgences, they were necessities.

Busted! Hey, but between those dates (2000-2008) what I said was absloutely truthful with one proviso: "indulgences with regard to TV or HT" (i.e., there remains that pesky car stereo in 2007). And yes Jay, once I started shopping after all those years of wanting surround sound, who could stop once begun and all went South (no disregard to my Southern brethren, some of my best friends), I mean I was having problems with my sound system, man!