8300HD and External SATA - It Works!! [Text View] - Page 11

davehancock

09-14-06, 04:21 PM

All previous posts that I found on this subject imply that the ext. drive must remain powered-on....If true, what what is the fundamental reason for that requirement?

Also, are any users concerned about a operating a heat generating device when ur away from home?

Thanx, Joe

The reason is that the 8300 apparently does not know if the external drive is "off-line". So you don't want the 8300 to start recording something to the drive when it isn't there. The only time the 8300 apparently checks for the drive is during boot of the 8300.

HOWEVER, if you are concerned about heat (say for a 2 weeks vacation) I'd suggest a couple of approaches:
1) Put the external drive and the 8300 on a power strip together and turn BOTH of them off. When you turn the power back on the external drive will usually come back up to speed before the 8300 boot procedure gets around to checking for the drive.
or
2) Disconnect the external drive: Unplug BOTH the external drive and the 8300 (unplug the 8300 first). Then do a hard reboot (the reboot where you hold POWER in while plugging the 8300 back in. It will rebuild the directory, and assume that there is no external drive. When you return (and want to make the external drive active): unplug the power to the 8300, reconnect (and power up) the external hard drive, then do the Hard Reboot thing again. It will recognize the drive and include the programs on the external drive again in the directory.

Paul Chiu

09-14-06, 06:00 PM

Saw this with a drive and says work with eSATA and USB2.
Would this work with 8300HD?

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000HPW286/dealtime-ce-feed-20/ref=nosim

Thanks

Paul

davehancock

09-14-06, 06:46 PM

Well, there have been discussions earlier that suggest that there is a "soft" upper limit on the size of external drive that the SARA software would support. These discussions point out that the directory is kept in RAM, and the amount of available RAM is limited (and varies from cable system to cable system). The maximum size commercial drive marketed for this application is 300GB. People have installed larger drives (I believe as large as 500GB) and have not reported problems - but they might not have problems till the drive gets relatively full.

But, have at it! And let us know how you make out (when the drive is at 90%). :)

Paul Chiu

09-14-06, 08:08 PM

It would take 300 hours of continuous JUNK HD recording and of distinct programs in order to test this 90% idea. May just have to do that over 2-3 weeks in order to feel comfortable about loading it up with important HD stuff and then snap off and add another 750GB....

Paul

Well, there have been discussions earlier that suggest that there is a "soft" upper limit on the size of external drive that the SARA software would support. These discussions point out that the directory is kept in RAM, and the amount of available RAM is limited (and varies from cable system to cable system). The maximum size commercial drive marketed for this application is 300GB. People have installed larger drives (I believe as large as 500GB) and have not reported problems - but they might not have problems till the drive gets relatively full.

But, have at it! And let us know how you make out (when the drive is at 90%). :)

tcat

09-15-06, 01:09 PM

Just wanted to post that I bought a Western Digital 500gig Sata ($159), and this AZIO eSATA case:
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=104205

Took 5 minutes to mount the drive in the case (drive just plugs in, no internal wires), and supplied esata cable just plugs in externally. Took me 2 beboots, because I think I did the plug/unplug in the wrong order the 1st time, but drive space went from 40% to 7%, so far no problems!

Case is very nice. Lots of holes front and rear. Case is warm at most (maybe 100 degrees). Very quiet.

RickD_99

09-15-06, 01:54 PM

I successfully attached a Maxtor Quickview 500GB drive to my 8300HD yesterday, but since doing the upgrade I am getting video/audio pixelation/dropouts every 5 minutes (you can almost set your watch to it) on live broadcasts. From looking at the lights on the external Maxtor it looks as though the video buffering is occurring on the Maxtor rather than the 8300HD's internal drive. Anyone know what might be responsible for these periodic dropouts? I am using a Coolgear enclosure for the Maxtor Quickview external drive.

Paul Chiu

09-15-06, 02:04 PM

Is there some temperature indicator? How did you get the 100?

Did you consider something even larger? Like this?

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=202734456&loc=101&sp=1

Just wanted to post that I bought a Western Digital 500gig Sata ($159), and this AZIO eSATA case:
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=104205

Took 5 minutes to mount the drive in the case (drive just plugs in, no internal wires), and supplied esata cable just plugs in externally. Took me 2 beboots, because I think I did the plug/unplug in the wrong order the 1st time, but drive space went from 40% to 7%, so far no problems!

Case is very nice. Lots of holes front and rear. Case is warm at most (maybe 100 degrees). Very quiet.

Riverside_Guy

09-15-06, 03:45 PM

HOWEVER, if you are concerned about heat (say for a 2 weeks vacation) I'd suggest a couple of approaches:

Let us all NOT forget the 8300 has 160G (mine is a WD, not know as the coolest running drive in the world) drive in it that runs 24/7. Far as I can tell, there's no fan in the 8300 (I can plainly hear the drive itself, nothing lese running in there). Most important thing (IMO) is where you place the damn thing; I've seen too many folks think nothing of placing electronic components on radiators.

Even if you get a case with a built-in fan, give iot some room to breathe.

fcsmith

09-15-06, 05:11 PM

Looks like I have a working setup now. My box is running Passport 2.5.066, with a Maxtor internal drive. For the external drive, I'm using the Apricorn enclosure that has been mentioned previously in this thread, along with a Maxtor 6L300S0 drive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817362002

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144421

I had previously tried a WD 320GB drive with a Rosewill enclosure. It appeared to work at first, but then I started to get the momentary freeze-ups that others have seen, as well as some instances where the 8300HD would freeze up completely and then eventually reboot. So far the Apricorn / Maxtor combo is performing flawlessly (except for the trick play bug inherent to Passport). I'm much happier with the Apricorn enclosure than the Rosewill. It's quieter, and does a much better job of keeping the drive cool.

I did try recording content to both drives and swapping them back and forth. The recorded material for both drives stayed in the directory, regardless of which drive was hooked up to the 8300HD. I did have problems with the WD drive when I hooked it back up (some material played back, but other times the box would freeze up), but since I was having trouble with it anyway, I can't say for sure whether the problems were from switching drives back and forth or from the drive itself (though I suspect it's the latter). When I unhooked the WD and hooked the Maxtor back up, everything worked fine - I could still view the material that I had recorded before swapping drives. So based on the fact that the Maxtor still works fine, I think having multiple drives and swapping them out will work, but I can't say for sure without trying it with another drive that I know works OK. It's a little inconvenient, since you have to reboot every time you switch, plus you would have to keep a record of which material is on which drive, but when I start to run out of space again I may order another Maxtor and try it.

Edit: I should add that Newegg was great to deal with. No problem at all returning the WD drive and Rosewill enclosure. They gave me an RMA number and emailed me an address label to tape to the box. Now all I have to do is drop the box by the UPS Store and I'm done. Pretty simple and easy.

davehancock

09-15-06, 05:16 PM

I did try recording content to both drives and swapping them back and forth. The recorded material for both drives stayed in the directory, regardless of which drive was hooked up to the 8300HD.

I'm not sure about Passport - but for SARA the directory would be rebuilt for the drives connected when you do a Hard (Some call it Warm) Reboot (holding the Power button in while plugging the power cord to the 8300 back in.

pepar

09-15-06, 05:29 PM

Let us all NOT forget the 8300 has 160G (mine is a WD, not know as the coolest running drive in the world) drive in it that runs 24/7. Far as I can tell, there's no fan in the 8300 (I can plainly hear the drive itself, nothing lese running in there). Most important thing (IMO) is where you place the damn thing; I've seen too many folks think nothing of placing electronic components on radiators.

Even if you get a case with a built-in fan, give iot some room to breathe.
Later versions of Passport have a general preference for power manager which allows the internal drive to spin down when the 8300HD is off. It will spin up to record a scheduled recording even it the box is still turned off. The power manager does not (presenty?) affect the external drive, but then one can choose the drive and enclosure with temperature management in mind. I do not know if the internal drive turns on even though the program to be recorded will go on the external drive.

renibats

09-16-06, 09:49 PM

Does anybody know if this drive from newegg will work on a SARA 8300HD?

Riverside_Guy

09-17-06, 09:49 AM

Hmmmm, I thought one of the neat features was that the box was always writing to it's buffer. I usually try and leave it set to the news channel I like when I shut it down at night... so without setting an explicit recording, I can come home late and still "rack it back" to watch the whole broadcast. Then I may leave it set to the channel of something I want to watch at 10 and shut it down.

Still, it is about strategy... and habits. Given what my electric bill is these days, I'll probably go for the energy savings (oh, when I get the frakking chance!).

JasonWW

09-18-06, 06:26 AM

pepar

09-18-06, 08:50 AM

Is there a thread with what HDD's works and what don't?
Same for enclosures?
Is there a 1 page guide instead of 84 pages?
Nope.

Do I basically need a SATA with a eSATA cable and an enclosure with a fan?
Yep.

Are the big 750GB still uncertain of using the whole space? What is the biggest size drive that has proven to work without causing the buffering or pixalation while recording?
There seems to be a lot of 300GB drives working, and some have had success with 400GB and 500GB. But then some members have had problems with all three I just mentioned. I don't think anyone has been able to come up with any reasons for that behavior. There is a theory, but proving it hinges upon having information that is not available to us such as SATA host contoller driver and some other internal component information.

vegggas, an active knowledgeable member here, strongly recommends the Maxtor Quickview Extender, a 300GB total solution. I like Maxtor Quickview products as well, but I break it down and go for the drives thenmselves sans Maxtor enclosure. Big caches and tuned-for-video-streaming loom large on my list for this application, and the Quickviews have those features. IN the interests of full disclosure, I am on Passport, while this thread is *generally" SARA as that was the fisrt to support SATA.

Riverside_Guy

09-18-06, 10:03 AM

Actually I think we do (should) know the general reason... software immaturity. Plus a dose of "release too early." Any disk I/O operation really should be totally bullet-proof before it's deployed, and the external disk support is just not bullet-proof (of course, we could also totally "tech-out" and argue at what point does one label something bullet-proof, but that misses the point).

I do a LOT of video work on the computer side, so I must ever so slightly disagree... "streaming for video" tweaks to the disk driver is not a requisite. Cache size is also a non-factor, remember this is streaming, so data already streamed is a non-factor (even if one racked the video back to replay something, an 8 or 16 MB cache is just way too small to ever be a factor). FAR more at issue is how the OS handles such applications ("good" multi-tasking in an OS is not a "it's there or not" type of thing, there a BIG "how good is it" factor; I have used OS X since it's inception, it was multitasking from the start BUT that function has gotten substantially better over time). FAR more important is how the high-level application code is written, writing a multi-theaded application is a LOT more difficult than single thread, and generally speaking, the large majority of programmers just haven't done it that much, especially given the M$ monoculture. FAR more at issue is the efficiency of the codec used to compress it, that was the whole reason h.264 is turning out to be so much better than the mpeg2 codecs.

Anyway, I seen a few posts by guys using the Seagate 750G drives, don't recall any of them posting about issues. By year's end we'll be hearing about 1T drives (for those that don't follow it, within the past year or so there was one single technology advance, perpendicular recording, that was HUGE to the storage market... example, you know that 1.8 drives are used in Pods and you know that they can range over 100G today, with perpendicular recording, they will get well over 200G in a few years.

I AM very curious about fan noise in that Apricorn box...

davehancock

09-18-06, 10:52 AM

Is there a thread with what HDD's works and what don't?
Same for enclosures?
Is there a 1 page guide instead of 84 pages?

Do I basically need a SATA with a eSATA cable and an enclosure with a fan?
Are the big 750GB still uncertain of using the whole space? What is the biggest size drive that has proven to work without causing the buffering or pixalation while recording?

You will not find a definitive "what works and what doesn't" because the individual cable systems vary considerably in what software is on their 8300s. And by that, I don't mean just the version of SARA or Passport - but also other applications that you may, or may not know about. As a result, what works here in Rochester, NY, may not work in Charlotte, NC.

zingerhill

09-18-06, 11:10 AM

Working System

I always like to see what actually worked for people. In case you are like me-- I bought the following from NewEgg and its running like a charm for about a week. You don't notice anything different except you have trippled your capacity! It's made a huge difference in the functionality of the recorder for me for about $250. It's just about plug and play. All necessary cables are included. No stuttering or any other problems. Can't hear any noise from the enclosure.

I am running SARA on Cablevision in the Bronx.

APRICORN EZ-BUS-DTS-EKIT 3.5" SATA External Enclosure - Retail
Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD5000YS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

Frohlich

09-18-06, 01:49 PM

davehancock

09-18-06, 03:33 PM

I did a search and couldn't find any confirmation. Anybody in Cincinnati with TWC gotten this to work. My brother in Columbus had it working but it appears it is city by city. I am sick of deleting shows all the time to make room for new shows, especially now that football is in full swing. I need more capacity :-)If you are on SARA it will work (what my earlier post was about is very large (750GB) drives. If you are on Passport is may partially work.

Frohlich

09-18-06, 03:54 PM

If you are on SARA it will work (what my earlier post was about is very large (750GB) drives. If you are on Passport is may partially work.

We are on Passport in Cincinnati. What does partially work mean (what works and what does not) ?

davehancock

09-18-06, 06:24 PM

I don't have the details - look back earlier in this thread (or do a search). (I'm on SARA).

pepar

09-18-06, 06:43 PM

I do a LOT of video work on the computer side, so I must ever so slightly disagree... "streaming for video" tweaks to the disk driver is not a requisite. Cache size is also a non-factor, remember this is streaming, so data already streamed is a non-factor (even if one racked the video back to replay something, an 8 or 16 MB cache is just way too small to ever be a factor). FAR more at issue is how the OS handles such applications ("good" multi-tasking in an OS is not a "it's there or not" type of thing, there a BIG "how good is it" factor; I have used OS X since it's inception, it was multitasking from the start BUT that function has gotten substantially better over time). FAR more important is how the high-level application code is written, writing a multi-theaded application is a LOT more difficult than single thread, and generally speaking, the large majority of programmers just haven't done it that much, especially given the M$ monoculture. FAR more at issue is the efficiency of the codec used to compress it, that was the whole reason h.264 is turning out to be so much better than the mpeg2 codecs.
Streaming video for playback from our 8300HDs is another animal. The "tuned-for-video-streaming" reference in this instance means dumbing down, or defeating, error correction. No time to go back and re-read. Experience the minor data gap and keep going. Re-reading would cause even more of a visible/audible glitch. Read the available technical info on Maxtor's Quickview drives.

hofs1

09-19-06, 12:13 AM

RaveD

09-19-06, 10:51 AM

...writing a multi-theaded application is a LOT more difficult than single thread, and generally speaking, the large majority of programmers just haven't done it that much, especially given the M$ monoculture...
Not to start an off-topic debate here, but this kind of generic statement really does not make any sense.

Microsoft Windows is natively multi-threaded and almost all applications use it in one way or another. In many applications using multi-threading is more logical and easier to program than single thread, especially multimedia applications.

There are clearly problems with the 8300HD when it comes to supporting external drives but there is nothing but speculation as to why. The fact that it works flawlessly with some drives, even some large drives, would indicate that it is not due to some fundamental flaw in the application layer, but a more low-level incompatibility between the drive and the host, be it hardware, firmware, or drivers.

We can be sure that the 8300HD software does not take advantage of the new 'optimized for streaming' drives since the specifications for those drives did not exist when the 8300HD operating system was developed.

Dennis.Mitchell

09-19-06, 11:26 AM

Are the big 750GB still uncertain of using the whole space? What is the biggest size drive that has proven to work without causing the buffering or pixalation while recording?

I had the 750gb Seagate SATA drive. I ran into unreliable recordings after filling approximately 60%. I always had pixelation with external drives (400gb too).

I have recently purchased a 500gb Maxtor Quickview SATA drive. Since the drive isn't very full yet, I will reserve judgement. I still see occasional pixelation. I had a couple of short recordings. Don't seem to have these problems when using only internal drive.

I am going to get a different eSATA enclosure as Pepar recommends (one with fan and no other electronics) and see if this helps.

It is very difficult to determine the real problem here.

Donald V

09-19-06, 06:52 PM

I have a WD 250GB external SATA drive that I have been using with my 8300HD w/SARA in Cox Cable in phoenix. I have 1.88.19.1 and my box is saying that the external drive isn't working properly and i've tried a hard reboot and that didn't work. Any suggestions? I've only had the drive for 2 weeks now...

EDIT: well I finally got the box to see the external hd again. But I've been having another problem. When the 8300HD is off it seems like the external drive goes to sleep. But when I turn on the box it doesn't wake up...I can't get to any of the recordings on the external drive. So then I have to unplug the box and do a hard reboot to get the external drive to work again. Any thoughts on this?

Donald :)

c1courtney

09-19-06, 07:41 PM

If we could connect the eSATA into a device that can communicate with the eSATA line and pass whatever handshake needed over the network. That would be something. Imagine that it can even be wireless.

2TB, imagine not having to every add another drive.

That's over 150 HD movies!

Paul

Nice start, but still not enough capacity IMHO.

I currently plan on recording about 44hrs/week (only have about 660GB between DHG-HDD500 and SA8300HD) If I went with a 750 eSATA drive I'd be 70% there. But I'd still only have 4 weeks worth of recording capacity. 2TB gets me to 5.7 weeks.

IMHO I need at least 22 weeks worth of recording Capacity. This way, I'm not forced to watch 44hrs of TV a week for 1/2 the year and almost no TV the rest of the year. I can buffer up programs and not rely on reruns.

That's about 11TB worth that I need. I figure this is 6-7yrs out before it's in the $200-300 range and I'll probably have upgraded eSATA drives at least twice during that window (waiting to find a 500GB eSATA drive < $150 made by either Seagate or Maxtor) I expect them to drop into this range real soon.

CCourtney

PS: 2TB wouldn't hold my DVD collection ;) (Currently a small sampling is occuping ~500GB of my HTPCs space.) By the time we get 10TB drives in the price range I'm willing to pay, I'll want even more due to HD-DVD/BR

D2LA

09-21-06, 01:04 PM

Paul Chiu

09-21-06, 01:24 PM

CC,

We really have no real choices here.

The cable companies have stopped allowing us to record through firewire 1394 from their cable boxes. The cable through the wall has only the OTA HD material which means no full length HD movies.

I don't mind at all back in 2003 when they implemented 5C and D-theater and required me to buy new D-VHS decks with them. I thought that it was fair and bought 2 more D-VHS JVC decks. I recorded on average 5 full length films a week since. My Older D-VHS Panasonic decks became just players and OTA recorders at that time.

Since earlier this year, TWC here in NYC has stopped the firewire ports of their boxes to be recorded. On some boxes, one can still see and hear the HD material, just cannot record it without macroblocking, pauses, and dropouts. With their 8300HD boxes, you cannot see the picture at all.

This bring us to the HD-DVR situation with the limited storage. Those of us willing to invest in storage can be totally screwed once the cable company implement another upgrade rendering those loaded hard drives into Windows' devices.

I am hoping that we are lucky this time and all our hard drives are still readable by the cable companies' DVRs of the future.

Finally, with 1080p DVDs out shortly, we may no longer want to record off cable.

Paul

Nice start, but still not enough capacity IMHO.

I currently plan on recording about 44hrs/week (only have about 660GB between DHG-HDD500 and SA8300HD) If I went with a 750 eSATA drive I'd be 70% there. But I'd still only have 4 weeks worth of recording capacity. 2TB gets me to 5.7 weeks.

IMHO I need at least 22 weeks worth of recording Capacity. This way, I'm not forced to watch 44hrs of TV a week for 1/2 the year and almost no TV the rest of the year. I can buffer up programs and not rely on reruns.

That's about 11TB worth that I need. I figure this is 6-7yrs out before it's in the $200-300 range and I'll probably have upgraded eSATA drives at least twice during that window (waiting to find a 500GB eSATA drive < $150 made by either Seagate or Maxtor) I expect them to drop into this range real soon.

CCourtney

PS: 2TB wouldn't hold my DVD collection ;) (Currently a small sampling is occuping ~500GB of my HTPCs space.) By the time we get 10TB drives in the price range I'm willing to pay, I'll want even more due to HD-DVD/BR

fcsmith

09-21-06, 01:42 PM

Hi guys... great thread.

I take it that it doesn't matter whether your drive is SATA I (1.5 Gb/sec) or II (3.0 Gb/sec) as far as compatibility with the SA8300HD goes. True? The external enclosure I am interested in ( APRICORN EZ-BUS-DTS-EKIT 3.5" SATA External Enclosure) is "only" capable of 1.5 Gb/sec, and the Maxtor Quickview drives, at least the 300 Gb, is again only SATA I.

-DD
SATA I is all you need. I'm using that enclosure and drive, and it's working great (I have Passport 2.5.066). Interestingly enough, I previously tried a 320GB Western Digital SATA II drive with an eSATA enclosure, and had problems with freezing of the picture, and macroblocking. I don't know if the problem was the size of the WD drive (some people have reported problems with drives greater than 300GB), or if the WD drive just wasn't compatible for some reason (my 8300HD has a Maxtor internal drive, don't know if that makes any difference).

pepar

09-21-06, 02:01 PM

SATA I is all you need. I'm using that enclosure and drive, and it's working great (I have Passport 2.5.066). Interestingly enough, I previously tried a 320GB Western Digital SATA II drive with an eSATA enclosure, and had problems with freezing of the picture, and macroblocking. I don't know if the problem was the size of the WD drive (some people have reported problems with drives greater than 300GB), or if the WD drive just wasn't compatible for some reason (my 8300HD has a Maxtor internal drive, don't know if that makes any difference).
While "SATA I" (150) is all that is needed to match the 8300HD's host controller, SATA II (300) is backward compatible. However, some - all? - SATA 300 drives can be forced to 150 operation. This suggests that it may not successfully, automatically negociate downward. Whether or not it's dependent on the 150 device, I do not know. But you might give that setting a try if it's available on your drive.

hofs1

09-22-06, 01:22 AM

This thread proved worthwhile for sure Thanks to all

I just hooked up the APRICORN EZ-BUS-DTS-EKIT 3.5" SATA External Enclosure
with a Western Digital 250gig 300mb sata drive (not big but priced right at compusa, im not archiving just wanted a bit more space for the weekly stuff my wife/kids find )

The Apricorn enclosure is really nice and it doesnt matter the spec says 150mb sec since the connector inside goes DIRECTLY from the HDD to the connector on the case so it passes whatever speed the drive is sending.

just pickup some gray duct tape cause the RED led is flipping bright but looks fine with the tape.

That enclosure seems the best i found since its just a fan and case NO converting board inside just sata to sata. Plus its mentioned in this thread allott.

Thanks again all nice here in Cablevision Northern New Jesey running Sara 1.88.23.1 :cool:

djones18

09-22-06, 08:47 AM

Paul Chiu

09-22-06, 10:26 AM

DoubleDAZ

09-22-06, 10:27 AM

It has no Firewire/1394 port, if that's what you mean.

Paul Chiu

09-22-06, 10:36 AM

No 1394 but they have RS232s, no? With that and a computer connect, that's enough data for HD transfer over to Windows. Also, you can upload HD stuff through USB/USB2, does TIVO-3 HD have that?

Paul

It has no Firewire/1394 port, if that's what you mean.

DoubleDAZ

09-22-06, 11:20 AM

It has USB and SATA, but SATA is not yet active and I'm not sure what the USB is for yet. You really should check out the S3 thread.

paule123

09-22-06, 02:19 PM

Can the new TIVO 3 that does HD with cable cards transfer the recordings onto a computer? I know that older TIVOs can transfer ANALOG material over to the computer. If the TIVO 3 HD can do this for HD stuff, it'll be a great alternative to getting external drives for out 8300HD DVRs.

Paul

The new S3 has the ESATA and copy-over-network functions currently disabled. It's a big topic of discussion over on the www.tivocommunity.com threads.

galen

09-27-06, 08:35 AM

Hello All,

As you may know I have been waiting (like the rest of the world) for Passport to fully support external HD. Well now it is finally here.

I was watching tv here in NYC at about 7:30am and all of a sudden my box started receiving a software download( no I never saw this live before but I am smart enough to know that it was happening, counted down in what appears to be hex).

After the box decompressed the firmware and stored it the unit rebooted. Upon boot it showed Passport(blah blah) but something below had changed. It now showed "APTIV DIGITAL". on the welcome screen For those that don't remember, APTIV is now developing the Passport software.

Ok so you say why does that all matter...

After the unit boots up I turned it on... I saw a screen caption box stating "an external drive has been connected please power down the unit and wait 10 seconds before diconnecting external drive with a "A" to accept. Unfortunately I still running my screwy drive that I hacked to get to work. I will order a new drive (or just move it to the other box currently with out a drive to make sure time-shifting for live tv works properly).

This box now also supports MR-DVR!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yes multi-room DVR (hope TW actually lets the customer use it).

Last item in the diag details is MR-DVR Status:
Last message: Welcome to MR-DVR!

Additional item added was SATA details showing SATA Status: Authorized

For those who are familiar with my whacky issues, no I have been unable to attempt and try VOD as channel 200 shows a system message" VOD is temporairly unavailible. We apoligize for any inconvenience this may have caused."

This is just plain great....about time.

:D

Echo 2.5.066
PTV 6.13.74.1sp

Paul Chiu

09-27-06, 09:23 AM

Man! You sound excited!

2.5.066 has been running in the other boroughs (Queens, Brooklyn) for some time and stable at that, so enjoy it.

Paul

Hello All,

As you may know I have been waiting (like the rest of the world) for Passport to fully support external HD. Well now it is finally here.

I was watching tv here in NYC at about 7:30am and all of a sudden my box started receiving a software download( no I never saw this live before but I am smart enough to know that it was happening, counted down in what appears to be hex).

After the box decompressed the firmware and stored it the unit rebooted. Upon boot it showed Passport(blah blah) but something below had changed. It now showed "APTIV DIGITAL". on the welcome screen For those that don't remember, APTIV is now developing the Passport software.

Ok so you say why does that all matter...

After the unit boots up I turned it on... I saw a screen caption box stating "an external drive has been connected please power down the unit and wait 10 seconds before diconnecting external drive with a "A" to accept. Unfortunately I still running my screwy drive that I hacked to get to work. I will order a new drive (or just move it to the other box currently with out a drive to make sure time-shifting for live tv works properly).

This box now also supports MR-DVR!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yes multi-room DVR (hope TW actually lets the customer use it).

Last item in the diag details is MR-DVR Status:
Last message: Welcome to MR-DVR!

Additional item added was SATA details showing SATA Status: Authorized

For those who are familiar with my whacky issues, no I have been unable to attempt and try VOD as channel 200 shows a system message" VOD is temporairly unavailible. We apoligize for any inconvenience this may have caused."

This is just plain great....about time.

:D

Echo 2.5.066
PTV 6.13.74.1sp

pepar

09-27-06, 10:08 AM

jrbd90

09-27-06, 11:37 AM

Is this Samsung 400gb drive worth trying???

$99!

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=340904&pfp=external&tabtype=ts#moreinfo

Riverside_Guy

09-27-06, 05:34 PM

Not going to repeat all I said in the NY thead, but 2.5.066 to me is an unstable mess, it has far more bugs and issues than 1.8.112.

ncted

09-28-06, 08:10 AM

Stupid Question:

Has anyone tried just replacing the internal drive in their 8300HD with a larger one?

Thanks,
Ted

jruhnke

09-28-06, 08:20 AM

Has anyone tried just replacing the internal drive in their 8300HD with a larger one?This has been asked before. Maybe the cableco would never notice, but they would not be happy if they realized you had opened the box and tampered with it. I'm not going to risk getting a bill from the cableco for $400, $500, $600, or whatever if something goes wrong.

ncted

09-28-06, 08:52 AM

This has been asked before. Maybe the cableco would never notice, but they would not be happy if they realized you had opened the box and tampered with it. I'm not going to risk getting a bill from the cableco for $400, $500, $600, or whatever if something goes wrong.

Fair enough.

DoubleDAZ

09-28-06, 09:06 AM

Not a stupid question, but since the box is owned by the cableco and SATA works for folks who frequent this thread, most folks have chosen to go the SATA route vs messing with the cable-owned box. Folks in Canada who own their boxes, are more likely to have hacked it with a larger drive. I don't recall if anyone has ever posted that they've hacked their box.

davehancock

09-28-06, 11:11 AM

It's been done. Remember a few month's back "Popular Science" magazine published an article about doing exactly that. They also discussed the external drive, and got several things wrong (so I don't know how accurate the article on replacing the internal drive was).

The article did acknowledge that the boxes in the US were owned by the cable company.

mad6c

09-28-06, 12:07 PM

What are my chances with SARA 1.88.23.1, Cablevision, Nassau County, Long Island?

davehancock

09-28-06, 02:56 PM

What are my chances with SARA 1.88.23.1, Cablevision, Nassau County, Long Island?
Good ;)

mad6c

09-28-06, 03:51 PM

I was looking at these two items:

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16817362002

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822148140

What do you think?

pepar

09-28-06, 03:57 PM

I was looking at these two items:

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16817362002

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822148140

What do you think?
Case looks good. I'd go with this Maxtor Quickview drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144421) though.

ncted

09-28-06, 04:53 PM

Case looks good. I'd go with this Maxtor Quickview drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144421) though.

So, Diamondmax = Quickview?

Ted

pepar

09-28-06, 07:09 PM

So, Diamondmax = Quickview?

Ted
No, Quickview = Quickview (http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/menuitem.6adb6b8313633595062e6be791346068/?channelpath=%2Fen_us%2FProducts%2FConsumer+Electronics%2FQu ickView+Family).

ncted

09-28-06, 07:26 PM

No, Quickview = Quickview (http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/menuitem.6adb6b8313633595062e6be791346068/?channelpath=%2Fen_us%2FProducts%2FConsumer+Electronics%2FQu ickView+Family).

Right, but the drive you linked to in your earlier post is a "Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM" according to newegg. What am I missing? I am new here, so please be patient with me.

Thanks,
Ted

pepar

09-28-06, 07:58 PM

Right, but the drive you linked to in your earlier post is a "Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM" according to newegg. What am I missing? I am new here, so please be patient with me.

Thanks,
Ted
Sorry. Was rushing to get to dinner. You're missing something subtle and inobvious - that I have yet to completely grok myself. Maxtor has a Quickview Family that consists of two drives in a sub-category (?) called Quickview 500. These two drives are 500GB and 400GB. Confused yet? <yoda>You will be.</yoda> The other subcategory is called . . Quickview! This is a group of sixteen drives from 40GB to 300GB with PATA and SATA interfaces. I've uploaded the datasheet to my webserver which you can download here. (http://www.peparsplace.com/quickview_data_sheet.pdf) If you search online vendors for the models listed, you will find them, but the descriptions at the vendors' sites mention zilch about Quickview for the drives. I have yet to resolve that seeming discrepancy. I am using a Quickview 300GB and a Quickview 500 500GB - quite successfully I must add.

hofs1

09-28-06, 10:43 PM

What are my chances with SARA 1.88.23.1, Cablevision, Nassau County, Long Island?

I might even say very good since thats the same version im running on cablevision in north jersey and the external case has run great up untill today when my 3yr old pulled out the smart card while powered up but im sure a full reboot will cure all when i return home tommorrow.(only see some recordings) :cool:

segask

09-29-06, 01:09 AM

so the Maxtor Quickview Expander kit and Quickview drives work. Some 8300's have an internal Maxtor, some like mine have an internal Western Digital. Lots of talk in this thread about the Maxtor Quickviews, but what about the Western Digital one:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=229

250GB for $199. I think the Quickview Expander 160GB is $199? You'd get around 10 hours more hi-definition capacity on the Western Digital one.

Has anyone tried it?

btw, I know many in this thread strongly believe in fanned enclosure, but if I'm reading that product page right, the Western Digital enclosure is fanless. Western Digital claims their drives run cooler than competitors equivalent 5400 rpm drives:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/ce/#heat

A recent article at Anandtech seems to back this claim up. They found the WD 3200KS to be one very cool running drive:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2803&p=11

Anyone here have any experience with the WDXS2500JS?

pepar

09-29-06, 07:02 AM

ncted

09-29-06, 09:57 AM

Sorry. Was rushing to get to dinner. You're missing something subtle and inobvious - that I have yet to completely grok myself. Maxtor has a Quickview Family that consists of two drives in a sub-category (?) called Quickview 500. These two drives are 500GB and 400GB. Confused yet? <yoda>You will be.</yoda> The other subcategory is called . . Quickview! This is a group of sixteen drives from 40GB to 300GB with PATA and SATA interfaces. I've uploaded the datasheet to my webserver which you can download here. (http://www.peparsplace.com/quickview_data_sheet.pdf) If you search online vendors for the models listed, you will find them, but the descriptions at the vendors' sites mention zilch about Quickview for the drives. I have yet to resolve that seeming discrepancy. I am using a Quickview 300GB and a Quickview 500 500GB - quite successfully I must add.

Oh, uh, well, thanks for, uh, clearing that up. ;)

Ted

Riverside_Guy

09-29-06, 11:28 AM

Newyorker

09-29-06, 11:55 AM

But does SATA work with the new software update?

c1courtney

09-29-06, 02:01 PM

The good news for those who had been sitting on Passport 1.8.112 that just got the 2.5.066 update is that prices have gone down while we've been thumb twiddling. I see 500G drives have just broke the 200 dollar barrier, SATA enclosures can be had for roughly 40 bucks, so for DIYers, this is great. 500G is still not a real sweet spot (lowest cost per G) for drives though, the 320's are (they run around 95 bucks at this point). I'm still debating with myself whether to go with a 320 or a 500G drive!

My observations, is that the 400-500GB drives are becoming the optimal GB/price drive w/ sale pricing.

Especially when you consider a couple factors. 1.) You're going to loose 20GB worth of space when you use it as an eSATA drive on the SA8300HD. 2.) You need to add in the cost of the encloser in you accounting.

w/ encloser
$95 320 -> 300/($95+$40) -> 2.22GB/$
$120 400 -> 380/($120+$40) -> 2.37GB/$
$160 500 -> 480/($160+40) -> 2.40GB/$

If you don't count the cost of the encloser then it's almost a wash, might as well go with the bigger drive.

w/o encloser
$95 320 -> 300/($95) -> 3.16GB/$
$120 400 -> 380/($120) -> 3.16GB/$
$160 500 -> 480/($160) -> 3.00GB/$

Note, these are all prices that I've seen on SATA drives w/ sale pricing between BB, CC, and Fry's over the past couple of weeks.

CCourtney

hofs1

09-29-06, 05:28 PM

Ok i hit my first bump in the road i have had a wd250gig drive in the apricorn case for a week with no problems 3 days ago my daughter pulled the smart card out while powered up but all got back ok after i walked my wife through a full power up/down run.

when i got home today i see the red light on the case blinking and the 8300 shows no more drive 2 in the menus. we had a full power failure last night and she says its been blinking since (this all happens while im away for work of course) well i can not bring back the drive the case reset ok but even plugged into a spare power port on the pc it doesnt seem to spinup. i cant beleive this drive died from a simple power failure plus the case and 8300 were plugged into a nice massive surge prtector. any ideas???

New Features in software version 1.88.x.x.
NOTE: Some of these may or may not be applicable to your particular cableco.

* Enhanced HDD Spin down - After 15 minutes of inactivity between 1:00am and 1:15am, the HDD will spin-down without powering off the STB, and a screen saver with an MSO configurable logo/graphic will be displayed while the HDD is spun-down. If an external SATA HDD is attached to the DVR, it will also spin down when the internal HDD spins down.

Is the above true i found this while reading the 8300 master's info looking for the hard boot procedure whilr trying to fix my problem.

segask

09-30-06, 12:34 AM

The Maxtor Quickview Expander is a complete solution ready to go right out of the box. The DIY route can save some money and/or get you a better/cooler/more attractive case.
like the Quickview Expander, the Western Digital WDXS2500JSNL56 (http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=229) is also a complete solution ready to just be plugged into the 8300.

Has anyone had any experience with it?

Veggas?

DoubleDAZ

09-30-06, 09:36 AM

Is the above true i found this while reading the 8300 master's info looking for the hard boot procedure whilr trying to fix my problem.That is a direct quote from the 1.88.x.x release notes. I don't have a SATA drive, but so far no one with 1.88.x.x has said it's not working as advertised, though I do know of one person who is having some dificulty getting his SATA to power up before the 8300 is ready to "see" it. We don't know yet if that is an individual setup problem or something more broad.

Riverside_Guy

09-30-06, 09:47 AM

CCourtney, where are you getting a $160 price for a 500G drive? I'm seeing a range from about 280 to a low of 199.

segask

09-30-06, 02:21 PM

Best Buy had the WD 500G drive on sale for $160 a couple weeks ago.

I'm tempted to try the Western Digital WDXS2500JSNL56 (http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=229)

shazbaat

09-30-06, 04:50 PM

I bought a cavalry CAXM37300 (300GB) external drive for my 8300HD running SARA 1.87.32.1. I connected the drive, powered up the drive and then powered up the 8300HD. Everything seemed to work fine, but after about 10 minutes the external drive spun down, and I was back to just the normal internal drive capacity.

Since then I've rebooted, and sometimes it comes up ok and works for another 10 minutes, and sometimes it doesn't seem to recognize the drive at all. I always get the "do you want to format?" prompt when I power up the 8300, but I don't always get the success message. sometimes I get no success message, and the hard drive immediately powers down.

Has anyone gotten a cavalry drive to work? Or has anyone seen these problems?

Thanks,
Steve

Riverside_Guy

10-01-06, 08:52 AM

CANNON-FODDER

10-01-06, 08:57 AM

Man! You sound excited! Not to seem to be trying to let the air out of your balloon...Just noting that galen had working eSATA on Passport 112 way before anyone else... I would not expect him to be up on [the thread's current collective position].
v/r,
C-F

Speedskater

10-01-06, 11:16 AM

I must have ordered the last in-stock Apricorn box Thursday.

davehancock

10-01-06, 04:59 PM

like the Quickview Expander, the Western Digital WDXS2500JSNL56 (http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=229) is also a complete solution ready to just be plugged into the 8300.

Has anyone had any experience with it?

Veggas?
Someone (Ponder) on our local HDTV Forum reported success with this unit back in July:

In any case this is a complete system designed for DVR expansion and compatible with the 8300HD that was easy to install and so far it works great. The DVR recognized the drive and asked if I wanted to format it which I confirmed. After a power down and power up the space was available.

I've since recommended it here and privately, though I don't recall any reports (I would have recalled negative ones)

pepar

10-01-06, 06:12 PM

Oh, uh, well, thanks for, uh, clearing that up. ;)

Ted
Declarification is my specialty. ;)

bakerb955

10-01-06, 09:17 PM

pepar

10-01-06, 09:25 PM

I've been using the Quickview Expander 300gb external drive since March 2006. No problems until this weekend. Orange light started blinking twice on the Quickview. Looked up error message - says SATA cable not connected. Now I have no idea how it happened. Maybe the cat did it. Powered everything down; plugged in the e-sata cable back into the 8300 HD DVR, plugged the power back in, everything works again. Maybe gravity or the weight of the cable and time pulled it out. Just a word to the wise - be careful it can happen.
Vibration?

c1courtney

10-01-06, 09:48 PM

CCourtney, where are you getting a $160 price for a 500G drive? I'm seeing a range from about 280 to a low of 199.

BB had WD 500GB SATA drive on sale for $159 about 2-3weeks ago. And prices online have them as low as $170 online after shipping right now http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_drives/284422-1.htm

Sales are periodic and you got to scan the local store adds and you can beat pricewatch prices at least 1/2 the time.

CCourtney

c1courtney

10-01-06, 09:54 PM

pepar

10-01-06, 10:04 PM

Personal experience with SATA cables have been that they're very easy to knock loose or come out with vibration. An easy fix to help prevent this is to use a hot glue gun to adhere the cable to the connector externally.

CCourtney
I'd imagine that a steady hand and a judicious amount of goop would be Good Things if attempting this method of securing the connector.

hofs1

10-02-06, 12:57 AM

Boy, now that external SATA "support" has come to Manhattan Passport users, it seems the boxes for DIYers have dried up. The Apricorn box is OS until mid October and the Kingwin box is also out of stock. I recall someone had found a single drive box with that "cheese grater" front, can anyone quickly put there hands on the vendor? I'd almost rather not having a fan, this is in the bedroom and would go in a very well ventilated spot.

You could do what i did and order from apricorn themselves http://apricorn.com/product_details.php?ID=432
A few more bucks than new egg but free shipping and very nice people to deal with

DoubleDAZ

10-02-06, 01:04 AM

Not sure if this has been a worthwhile effort, but I've gone though this thread back to July 1 and summarized working combinations of SATA drives/enclosures for our local forum and I thought I'd cross-post here:

NOTE: This is not an all-inclusive list by any means and I have no personal experience with any of these items. Also, any links included herein do not constitute an endorsement of any kind, they are simply a link to a source as provided by a poster in this forum. Oh, and please check the General Notes at the end of this post.

NEW!!! xnappo has developed a database for tracking compatibility issues between SA8300HD and various SATA drives/enclosures.
Note: The is currently limited to SARA users.

SA8300HD eSATA Compatibility Database (SARA only) (http://baseportal.com/cgi-bin/baseportal.pl?htx=/xnappo/main)

The first consideration for an eSATA drive should include whether to use the one recommended by SA for the 8300HD DVR - the Maxtor Expander series. The Expander is a prepackaged external hard drive which you just connect via the included eSATA cable to the DVR, and voila! easy DVR storage expansion. The main concern is cost. The 160Gb version runs about $200 while the 300GB version runs around $300. Here is a link to one on Buy.com: Maxtor 160Gb Expander (http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10408424&loc=101&sp=1)

AZ HDTV Forum (User ID - Zephyr)
NewEgg has all the hardware for ~$140 using the links below. This enclosure comes with all the necessary hardware for hookup to the DVR.
Seagate Barracuda ST3320620AS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA Drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140)
AZiO ENC311SU41 Aluminum 3.5" eSATA + USB 2.0 External Enclosure (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817106097)

AVS -------------------------------------------
Single Units
Maxtor QuickView QVX Expander (http://www.weaknees.com/maxtor_qvx.php)

320GB QuickSilver SATA USB2.0 Hard Drive (http://www.pcconnection.com/ProductDetail?Sku=6333092)

Western Digital WDXS2500JSNL56 (http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=229)

300GB PS QVX E-SATA/16MB QV EXPANDER EXT HDD (http://www.buy.com/prod/300GB_PS_QVX_E_SATA_16MB_QV_EXPANDER_EXT_HDD_UP_TO_185_HOURS/q/loc/101/10408425.html)

160GB PS QVX E-SATA/2MB QV EXPANDER EXT HDD (http://www.buy.com/prod/160GB_PS_QVX_E_SATA_2MB_QV_EXPANDER_EXT_HDD_UP_TO_100_HOURS/q/loc/101/10408424.html)

Seagate eSATA 500GB kit (ST3500601XS-RK) (http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?pfp=srch1&Ntt=ST3500601XS%2DRK&N=0&Dx=mode+matchall&Nty=1&D=ST3500601XS%2DRK&Ntk=All&product_code=341441)

Paired Combinations/Combos/Kits
neTegriti SA 8300HD eSATA Hard Drive upgrade kits w/160G to 500G drives (http://discountechnology.com/Products/DVR-Upgrades)

Samsung 400GB External Hard Drive USB+SATA II Enclosure (By Premiertek - search ebay)

APRICORN EZ-BUS-DTS-EKIT 3.5" SATA External Enclosure (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817362002)
Western Digital 250Gb SATA-300 drive (http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?pfp=SEARCH&Ntt=western+digital&N=11+502461&Ne=502457&Ntk=All&product_code=338173&Pn=Caviar_SE16_250GB_Hard_Drive) or
Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD5000YS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136032)

Western Digital 500Gb Sata (No other specs provided)
AZiO ENC311SU41 Aluminum 3.5" eSATA + USB 2.0 External Enclosure (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817106097)

Seagate 750GB Internal Serial ATA Hard Drive (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7909301&st=seagate+750&lp=2&type=product&cp=1&id=1149208161406)
Por-Z SATA High-Speed External Enclosure Kit (http://www.firewiredirect.com/product/360/)

Rosewill RX343-S SLV 3.5" eSATA and USB 2.0 External Enclosure (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817173022R)
Seagate Barracuda ST3320620AS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA Drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140)
Quality Cables SS-1ESES eSATA to eSATA Cable (1m - 3ft.) (http://www.satacables.com/html/esata-external-esata-shielded-.html)

Maxtor MXT L01F500 500GB SATAII 500GB (http://snipurl.com/vjyv)
AMS Venus DS3 DS-2316SU2SBK Aluminum 3.5" USB2.0 (type B) + SATA External Enclosure (http://snipurl.com/vjyz)

Vantec NexStar 3 3.5" SATA to eSATA / USB 2.0 External hard Drive Enclosure (http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1785959&CatId=0)
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB 7200 rpm 16MB Cache SATA-150 (http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1487964&CatId=139)

Maxtor 300GB L01S300 16MB Buffer SATA Hard Drive Kit (http://shop4.outpost.com/product/4116853?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG)
Adaptec eSATA/USB 2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure Kit (http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/consstor/enclosures/ACS-300/)

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144421)
SABRENT EC-ESTK Aluminum 3.5" e.SATA External Enclosure (http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16817366009)

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144421)
AZiO ENC311SU41 Aluminum 3.5" eSATA + USB 2.0 External Enclosure (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817106097)

Individual Drives
None specified.

Individual Enclosures
Vantec NST-360SU-BK NexStar-3 External 3.5inch SATA&USB2.0 Hard Drive Enclosure (Black) CA-360SUBK (http://www.etech4sale.com/hardware/partinfo-id-148728.html)

Por-Z SATA High-Speed External Enclosure Kit (http://www.firewiredirect.com/product/360/)

Combos With Pass/Fail User Reviews
AZIO USB/SATA case/Maxtor 6L300S0/Sara 1.88.17.a100 - FAIL
AZIO USB/SATA case/Seagate 400GB 7200.10/Sara 1.88.17.a100 - FAIL
Apricorn USB/SATA case/Maxtor 6L300S0/Sara 1.88.17.a100 - PASS
Apricorn USB/SATA case/Seagate 400GB 7200.10/Sara 1.88.17.a100 - UNKNOWN

General Notes:

This thread applies to both SARA and Passport users, so it would help get answers sooner if you include a location in your profile and the software you are using in your signature. Please include version numbers. Check here (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=6225742&&#post6225742) to find out how to if whether you are SARA or Passport. That way, when you post a question, the right people are in a better position to give you the right answer.
eSATA refers to the connector, not the cable itself. AND such cables have 2 connectors, some are SATA/eSATA and some are eSATA/eSATA. The 8300HD has one eSATA connector on the cable, what's on the other end depends on which enclosure you have.

segask

10-02-06, 01:07 AM

segask

10-02-06, 01:14 AM

Not sure if this has been a worthwhile effort, but I've gone though this thread back to July 1 and summarized working combinations of SATA drives/enclosures for our local forum and I thought I'd cross-post here:

The first consideration for an eSATA drive should include whether to use the one recommended by SA for the 8300HD DVR - the Maxtor Expander series. The Expander is a prepackaged external hard drive which you just connect via the included eSATA cable to the DVR, and voila! easy DVR storage expansion. The main concern is cost. The 160Gb version runs about $200 while the 300GB version runs around $300. Here is a link to one on Buy.com: Maxtor 160Gb Expander (http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10408424&loc=101&sp=1)
there's also a Western Digital one:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=229

250Gb for $200.

is this one recommended by SA also? or is it only the Maxtor Expander?

some 8300s have internal Maxtors, some such as mine have internal Western Digitals.

hofs1

10-02-06, 10:41 AM

preliminary success!

Western Digital WD3200KS 320G SATA2 16MB cache
Apricorn EZ-BUS-DTS-EKIT enclosure

No apparent stuttering or macroblocking or pixellation.

Fan in the Apricorn is too noisy for my taste. I might try the fanless Vantec Nexstar, or maybe I'll modify the Apricorn with a Zalman fan speed controller. Based on what I've read, the Westerm Digital WDXX00KS drives run relatively cool.

Cox San Diego, CA
SARA 1.88.19.1
8300HD internal drive is listed in diagnostic pages as WD1600BB

I must have gotten lucky with my apricorn cause i only here it when i walk up to the tv and even then i here the hard drive more than the case. wonder if the fan could be changed for a better/hq type down the road but all in all it works well.

hofs1

10-02-06, 10:44 AM

I found this enclosure awhile back wonder if anyone tried it yet http://cooldrives.com/onba3esusb20.html

DoubleDAZ

10-02-06, 10:54 AM

there's also a Western Digital one:It's in the "working" list under Drives, but I see I need to move 2 from that section to the Combo section, since they are both complete solutions, not just drives. :)

pepar

10-02-06, 10:59 AM

I found this enclosure awhile back wonder if anyone tried it yet http://cooldrives.com/onba3esusb20.html
eSATA and USB 2.0 Back-Up Ready Enclosure with Fan usually indicates that there's circuitry. I prefer a straight-through mechanical/electrical connection with NO circuitry.

Oznec

10-02-06, 11:06 AM

I was having the pixelation problem and lack of live features when I hooked up my external drive. I emailed TW and this is what they said:

Dear Customer

TRACKING NUMBER: 97276

Inquiry: As per AVS forum and its helpful people I have hooked up an external
hard drive to my 8300 hd dvr. The problem i'm having is that the live
buffering and controls do not work when this drive is hooked up. I
cannot pause live tv anymore and also the signal gets lost/scrambles
much more often with the drive hooked up. They said something about
the live buffering going to the drive with the most free sapce but no live
buffer reserved space being allocated on the external drive. Any
fixes to these problems in the works or any known fixes?
thanks

Response:Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately none of our DVR’S has the ability to support an external hard drive. We have not been advised that this will changed.

Please let us know if we can be of any additional assistance.

Thank you for using Time Warner Cable.
Sophia
Time Warner Cable Support
Raleigh, NC
919-595-4892
1-866-489-2669

pepar

10-02-06, 11:42 AM

I was having the pixelation problem and lack of live features when I hooked up my external drive. I emailed TW and this is what they said:

Dear Customer

Response:Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately none of our DVR’S has the ability to support an external hard drive. We have not been advised that this will changed.

Please let us know if we can be of any additional assistance.

Thank you for using Time Warner Cable.
Sophia
Time Warner Cable Support
Raleigh, NC
919-595-4892
1-866-489-2669
Welcome to the thread. :)

All your DVRs are belong to us.

Riverside_Guy

10-02-06, 12:04 PM

Oh boy, glue the connectors? Sorry, but that's one of those things I would shout "DO NOT TRY THIS." FWIW, I have 4 external SATA drives vis eSATA connections with the somewhat thick cables just dangling down and have zero issues/problems with cables coming loose, AND they are in boxes with fans on top of my computer (which has a total of 10 fans in the case).

WOW, that was a great post Dave, worth tons as it summarizes much that has gone on before. Probably THE most "worthwhile post in the whole thread!

My guess is that most folks here are not really set up to attach SATA external drives to their computers, so I USB port is a good fallback for them. I agree, I'd rather a box without circuitry, then again I may have to go for one because of other factors.

As for the "we don't support" thing, of course we should expect that from a company that employes thousands of lawyers. It IS designed to reduce their liability. However, it sure as hell CAN be argued that they put the code in, and there's a "reasonable expectation" that it functions correctly. There are a lot of tort actions that hinge on that point.

OTOH, it also could come down to a game of chicken; we get together to file a class action, they go and cut the code out and upgrade everyone. Then again, that could be actionable, they gave us the ability, then took it away because they didn't want to bother making it filly functional.

Very difficult choices; I just wish we could get some statement of purpose. To know they understand the issue and are trying to fix the bugs. One thing for sure, this was no rogue hack, they put the damn code in there, they know it's in there, they know it's half-assed.

As I understand it (trying to summarize all that I've read), there's an underlying OS, made by Aptiv these days. Then there's the application itself, Passport. Looking towards next year, it seems the upper level Passport application is going to be replaced by the OCAP enabled Digital Navigator. My guess is that the OS, low level stuff is there already (i.e. it CAN read/write and stream video/audio data from an external drive), but the issue lies in the high level application. So the question is "will they rev passport to fix the most egregious issues before they roll out the Digital Navigator?" (obviously there's some speculation on my part here, I would like to know if I have the technology misunderstood).

So I think it appropriate for those who have hooked up drives, who have experienced the issues to file complaints no matter what response we get.

DoubleDAZ

10-02-06, 12:28 PM

Riverside_Guy,

I think you have it pretty much right, though it's really hard to pinpoint just where the SATA support lies, in the OS or Passport, probably both. Personally I think you're stuck in that black hole of whether or not to upgrade Passport in view of the coming Navigator. The bigger question I would be asking is will Navigator fully support SATA expansion? I know it might sound silly or be considered an excuse, but since Passport has more features than SARA, is it possible there is not enough programming space to do the job right for SATA? Or at least are memory limits making SATA support more difficult to fit in? I see the S3 shipped without SATA support too, so there must be something making support more difficult than we think it should be.

pepar

10-02-06, 12:53 PM

My guess is that most folks here are not really set up to attach SATA external drives to their computers, so I USB port is a good fallback for them. I agree, I'd rather a box without circuitry, then again I may have to go for one because of other factors.
Solid advice. It's not black and white.

As for the "we don't support" thing, of course we should expect that from a company that employes thousands of lawyers. It IS designed to reduce their liability. However, it sure as hell CAN be argued that they put the code in, and there's a "reasonable expectation" that it functions correctly. There are a lot of tort actions that hinge on that point.

OTOH, it also could come down to a game of chicken; we get together to file a class action, they go and cut the code out and upgrade everyone. Then again, that could be actionable, they gave us the ability, then took it away because they didn't want to bother making it filly functional.

Very difficult choices; I just wish we could get some statement of purpose. To know they understand the issue and are trying to fix the bugs. One thing for sure, this was no rogue hack, they put the damn code in there, they know it's in there, they know it's half-assed.
You're really jazzed up about this, aren't you? And statements like this - "Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately none of our DVR’S has the ability to support an external hard drive. We have not been advised that this will be changed." from a major national cable provider don't shake your position? :) Who's your doctor and what do I need to get the same prescription. :)

So I think it appropriate for those who have hooked up drives, who have experienced the issues to file complaints no matter what response we get.Yeah, go ahead and rock the boat for those of us whose external drives are working. This is EXACTLY why SA, Aptiv and your friendly neighborhood cable company don't want to talk about it beyond "Thank you for contacting us. Unfortunately none of our DVR’S has the ability to support an external hard drive. We have not been advised that this will changed." - they don't want their CSRs' chains pulled over some non-implemented interface. Furthermore, it will solidify the postion of those arguing that because a working SATA interface will consume additional tech support time while getting them ZERO additional revenue, it should never be implemented. :(

DoubleDAZ

10-02-06, 01:07 PM

Do you guys really think it's that cut & dry with TWC, no revenue = no support? It seems to me if that were the case, all cableco's would respond the same way, or am I just being naive? Of course, since SATA appears to work fine with SARA, I don't know what happens if we call Cox with a SATA-related problem. I do know for a fact that the local Cox folks test SATA whenever they get a new SARA release. I don't know if this is part of the "official" test procedure though or just an individual employee decision/test, but SATA is tested.

BTW. I agree that there is a way to approach this with the cableco so as not to ruffle too many feathers and ruin something for those who have gotten SATA to work, albeit somewhat crippled.

pepar

10-02-06, 01:28 PM

Do you guys really think it's that cut & dry with TWC, no revenue = no support?
One ingredient missing from that formula. IMHO, no revenue + CSR/Tech Support time consumed = no support. I just can't see it any other way. I wish I could.

DoubleDAZ

10-02-06, 01:31 PM

FWIW, I spoke with DMILANI and he kindly added a link to my Summary Post to his first post in this thread. That should make it easier for everyone to find it and refer newbies. Thanks to DMILANI for his support.

Paul Chiu

10-02-06, 01:33 PM

Share your views.

BTW, your last avatar looks better.

Paul

One ingredient missing from that formula. IMHO, no revenue + CSR/Tech Support time consumed = no support. I just can't see it any other way. I wish I could.

pepar

10-02-06, 01:49 PM

Share your views.

BTW, your last avatar looks better.

Paul
It hit 40 degrees here the other night. Those are my feet and that's the Caribbean. It's a state-of-mind thing . . .

:D

Paul Chiu

10-02-06, 02:11 PM

Looks like a beer commerical!

:rolleyes:

It hit 40 degrees here the other night. Those are my feet and that's the Caribbean. It's a state-of-mind thing . . .

:D

c1courtney

10-02-06, 02:31 PM

pepar

10-02-06, 02:46 PM

Do you have an actually reason behind this statement?

It is actually a good solution to problematic SATA connectors, which do have a tendency to pop out, when not one of my other connectors have this tendency.

'Hot Melt Glue Gun' material that I'm referring (Commonly available at hobby stores and hobby areas of major retailers) does not harm electronic components what so ever, and it's not uncommon for it to be used to hold down wires when blue wiring a board because it's non-conductive and is quick and ease to use.

It also has 'softening point' of about ~380F.

CCourtney
Hi CCourtney,

It does *sound* peculiar to glue connectors. And "hot" raises a red flag to anyone not in the know on this thing. Which would perhaps be most of us. :)

c1courtney

10-02-06, 05:07 PM

Yeah, I know if one reads this without knowing what a Hot Glue Gun is, it could sound fishy. I did state that it was to adhere it externally (DO NOT put hot glue in the connector itself but plug it in and use hot glue to hold the connector to the plug)

I've actually seen Chinese and Korean electronics companies that actually fill up their USB connectors on PCs with Hot Glue to prevent there employees from using USB Memory Sticks/Drives/Network Adaptors with their work PCs especially on Lab PCs (Industrial Spying.) I also learned quickly not to bring a USB memory stick to a Samsung site (not long after a Samsung employee walked out with a CD burned w/ a lot of Samsung IP, who later went to work for LG - Security there became very intense after this happened.)

CCourtney

hofs1

10-02-06, 11:47 PM

eSATA and USB 2.0 Back-Up Ready Enclosure with Fan usually indicates that there's circuitry. I prefer a straight-through mechanical/electrical connection with NO circuitry.

I agree thats why the Apricorn case is so nice other than the power and fan circuit the sata connector goes straight to the outside connector.

I did shoot a quest to cooldrives about this and they claim sata connections bypass any circiutry but i still got the apricorn box and seem very happy.

dnarby

10-03-06, 06:52 PM

Success story

I used this HD http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822144421

And this enclosure http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16817366009

The DVR is running Passport software.

I powered up the HD, waited a minute and plugged it in. I didn't unplug the DVR, it was running.

The message came up "External drive" bla bla "Do you want to format" bla bla, I hit the button... Done!

It didn't even interfere with the show that was recording.

This was about the easiest HT upgrade I ever did.

While I think now that basically any 7200 RPM SATA drive with a 16mb buffer would work, I chose this one because another member had used an identical drive, it was pretty cheap compared to other drives, and the Maxtor Diamondback has a 3 year warrantee. In the future, I may buy a 500gb (or bigger) drive with similar buffer and RPM specs (and use this HD on a computer... Then I'll know for sure about my 'theory').

- Dave

ncted

10-03-06, 09:47 PM

ncted

10-03-06, 09:51 PM

I was having the pixelation problem and lack of live features when I hooked up my external drive. I emailed TW and this is what they said:
Thank you for using Time Warner Cable.
Sophia
Time Warner Cable Support
Raleigh, NC
919-595-4892
1-866-489-2669

Yeah, Sophia answers all my queries. Well...she responds to them anyway. ;)

Ted

HRPretzel

10-04-06, 12:47 AM

terpnut

10-04-06, 12:50 AM

Anybody have any good online sources for the necessary SATA I to SATA II cables?

BobKat6

10-04-06, 12:55 AM

I'm confused on the difference between e.Sata and an external sata?? and if it matters??

I purchased the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3400620AS 400GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive link (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148138)

and I'm deciding on between enclosures

Vantec no/fan w/ eSata (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145167)

or Apricorn w/ fan but labled external sata (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817362002) which I assume is different from e.Sata

I'd like to have the fan cooling of the Apricorn but I loose the e.Sata? and does that matter?

e(xternal)SATA. No difference.

segask

10-04-06, 02:00 AM

pepar

10-04-06, 08:24 AM

Anybody have any good online sources for the necessary SATA I to SATA II cables?
Most, if not all, online vendors that sell hard drives sell cables as well. Newegg and Zipzoomfly are my preferred vendors.

c1courtney

10-04-06, 09:05 AM

e(xternal)SATA. No difference.

Yes and no. There is one small difference and that's the cable. For devices that take an eSATA drive you do need the eSATA connector to plug it up as a SATA connector will not plug into it. Adaptors are widely available though.

Basically, if you see an encloser that says eSATA it's assumed to have an eSATA cable, and if it says external SATA HDD encloser it's not expected to have the eSATA cable. Of course as I say this, you'll have a number of people pointing out the opposite and in fact some like the very popular APRICOT encloser are shipping with both a SATA cable and an eSATA cable.

Basically what I'm saying is, make sure that the encloser has an eSATA cable or expect to buy one.

CCourtney

Riverside_Guy

10-04-06, 09:48 AM

Indeed, it's all about the connector, not the wire. An internal SATA connector is slightly L shaped, so it's sometimes called a L connector. The connector designed to external connection is AKA I connector as it's straight (think of a bigger version of a USB type connector). The eSATA connector is supposed to be designed to be plugged and unplugged numerous times; typically an internal connector gets used once or twice and is left that way.

One DOES have to be careful buying external cases, many times they'll say it is meant for external use, but has an external "internal, I" style connector. Yes, cables are made that have an internal connection on one side and a external connection on the other... the 8300HD has an external (eSATA) connector on it.

W/Passport, it seems the default action on recordings is "keep until space is needed." Which is very reasonable. However, they DO make notations in the list of recorded programs. They use an hourglass symbol which seems to consistently mean 2 days until it may get erased. When you see the hourglass, all the recordings will have notations as to how many days may be left... it takes into account future scheduled recordings, obviously. I see this a fair amount of time because I have a LOT of series recordings going, so it's looking ahead. I find this very a workable system.

Riverside_Guy

10-04-06, 09:52 AM

Anybody have any good online sources for the necessary SATA I to SATA II cables?

Wrong terminology. I and II are indicators of the drives i/o capabilities, both use the same cables/connectors. The correct terms for the connectors are SATA and eSATA, but folks muddy the picture by using other terms as well ("I" and "L" are frequently used, L is SATA and I is eSATA).

pepar

10-04-06, 09:59 AM

Tonight, I noticed some older recordings had disappeared. AFAIK, my 8300HD never ran out of space. I have been monitoring it closely while I decide whether it is worth trying out the eSATA expansion. I have 2 questions:

1. How low on space does the 8300 w/Passport Echo have to get before it decides to delete old recordings?
With Pasport, you can set a recording to manually erase and it should never disappear. "Less" than that, you can determine by placement on the list what gets erased first to make room for new recordings.

2. With respect to the live broadcast trick-play bug when one adds an external hard drive and the work-around, after one puases and then records live TV, does the 8300 correctly dump the live buffer that is then being recorded properly to the recording? That is, if I press pause, then record, then list, and choose the recording I just setup from live TV, does the recording start from the beginning of what used to be the live buffer, or only from where I paused it?
With a drive attached, there doesn't seem to be any live buffering, so the recording starts only when you give it the record command.

I got down to 7GB of available space recently, so I am probably going to have to go with the eSATA solution. I am just trying to correctly set my expectations.

Thanks,
Ted
I think it's important to have low, or no, expectations that it will work. And when you do have it working, to have low, or no, expectations that it will continue to work. And you should be prepared at any time to lose everything you have on the external drive. Those expectations set you free. In the spring we had a power outage. Upon restoration of power, one of my 8300HD returned to operation with everything intact and the other lost everything on the external drive. I cursed and moved on.

pepar

10-04-06, 10:01 AM

Indeed, it's all about the connector, not the wire.
Doesn't an eSATA cable have (extra) shielding and/or more rugged construction?

ncted

10-04-06, 11:11 AM

With Pasport, you can set a recording to manually erase and it should never disappear. "Less" than that, you can determine by placement on the list what gets erased first to make room for new recordings.

Yeah, we did not have the deleted recordings set to manually erase, but I thought I still had room left.

With a drive attached, there doesn't seem to be any live buffering, so the recording starts only when you give it the record command.

:sigh:

I think it's important to have low, or no, expectations that it will work. And when you do have it working, to have low, or no, expectations that it will continue to work. And you should be prepared at any time to lose everything you have on the external drive. Those expectations set you free. In the spring we had a power outage. Upon restoration of power, one of my 8300HD returned to operation with everything intact and the other lost everything on the external drive. I cursed and moved on.

With that in mind, I decided to order the Western Digital WDXS2500JSNL56. They have free shipping and a very liberal return policy. Plus, this drive was specifically designed to work with the 8300. I'll let everyone here know how it works. Thanks to everyone for your helping me make this decision.

Ted

hofs1

10-04-06, 01:37 PM

hofs1

10-04-06, 01:45 PM

In the spring we had a power outage. Upon restoration of power, one of my 8300HD returned to operation with everything intact and the other lost everything on the external drive. I cursed and moved on.

That happened to me recently but the drive itself blew up totally dead even plugged into a pc. did you just reformat and continue or did u "lose"the drive too.

any thoughts to putting the external drive on a simple ups to prevent this down the road?

pepar

10-04-06, 02:18 PM

That happened to me recently but the drive itself blew up totally dead even plugged into a pc. did you just reformat and continue or did u "lose"the drive too.

any thoughts to putting the external drive on a simple ups to prevent this down the road?
Upon restoration of power, both boxes gave me the "drive attached" message to which there is but one selection to make: OK. One 8300HD was as if nothing had happened while the other's list of recordings was reduced to the internal drive's content.

davehancock

10-04-06, 03:28 PM

Upon restoration of power, both boxes gave me the "drive attached" message to which there is but one selection to make: OK. One 8300HD was as if nothing had happened while the other's list of recordings was reduced to the internal drive's content.

I've had the same thing (powered back up OK with just the message) happen several times. Power is pretty reliable here, but a while back I was doing electrical work that required me to shut off power. If power is restored to both the 8300 and the external drive at the same time, the drive is up and spinning by the time the 8300 gets around to checking it.

BTW, I've had the external drive for better than 1 1/2 years and it's always worked well. :)

HRPretzel

10-04-06, 05:14 PM

The Apricorn case includes both cables 1) sata to sata and 2) sata to esata
pop in the drive plug it in to power and the 8300 and away you go.
Some feel the fan/case is noisy I havent had that feeling but to each his own but the dts kit is well built mostly aluminum. :cool: I went with the Apricorn (weird name)... Ordered off ZZF cause newegg is out of stock. I'll report back how everything works out. Thanks for the suggestions.

c1courtney

10-04-06, 06:01 PM

Doesn't an eSATA cable have (extra) shielding and/or more rugged construction?

More rugged construction - Yes (well at least the connector)
Extra shielding - I would guess No, extra shielding is to prevent interferance from electromagnetic noise. This is MUCH more of a need inside a PC than outside environment.

CCourtney

Riverside_Guy

10-05-06, 12:25 PM

Only visual thing I noticed is a thicker coating of rubber (probably a synthetic) around the connector.

I was going to ask exactly how one sees the "trick play bug" so I take it you press pause and noting happens, right? So the "work-around" is hit record instead, then hit mute on the audio system, then turn off the TV so you aren't seeing silent video continue to play. Most typically when I need to do this, it's because the phone rings or someone needs some attention, so having to go for so many steps sure is a "bad" work-around.

pepar

10-05-06, 12:34 PM

I was going to ask exactly how one sees the "trick play bug" so I take it you press pause and noting happens, right?
You hit "PAUSE" and it pauses, but you cannot rewind. And when you hit play, it resumes but from the live broadcast, not from when it was paused missing everything in between.

c1courtney

10-05-06, 02:32 PM

Pepar,

Wow, nasty bug. Is this on all versions of Passport or just specific versions (or just starts happening when you add an eSATA drive?)

CCourtney

pepar

10-05-06, 02:40 PM

Pepar,

Wow, nasty bug. Is this on all versions of Passport or just specific versions (or just starts happening when you add an eSATA drive?)

CCourtney
All Passport 8300HDs with external drives attached. SATA support is not official and, evidently, this is the one remaining bug that needs exterminated. No word on when or even if that will occur. IMO, it's a small price to pay for quadrupling my storage capacity.

Hamerhokie

10-05-06, 09:03 PM

Here is what I put together:

Hard Drive - Western Digital WD5000KS 500 GB
Enclosure - Cool Gear eSata

Followed the directions in the 8300HD manual for connecting and setting it up.

What I got the first time I powered everything up:

1. Standard 'format HD' message, immediately followed by
2. Standard 'HD is corrupted' message

The latter message is anticipated in the users manual and you are supposed to hit 'A' to continue to format. When I did this, the little red light on the enclosure came on, then went off in a few seconds. Left it for a while, nothing else happened.

After that, any time I turn on the DVR I get the same 'format HD' message, same red light, same nothing. No indication formatting has taken place, same capacity reported in the DVR menu.

Any ideas?

KamaloPSU

10-05-06, 09:47 PM

Riverside_Guy

10-06-06, 12:23 PM

pepar

10-06-06, 12:35 PM

Good God Almighty pepar, that's much worse than just not pausing at all. At least if you hit pause and nothing happens, one is kinda reminded that one should be hitting record.

I dunno, I'm actually debating whether to go for the external drive or not. I seem to be somewhat peaceful with the concept of making an effort to watch my recorded stuff quickly. I still have a LOT of DVD content I haven't watched (or would like to watch again) so that kinda covers archival stuff. It might be very different if we had tons more HD content, but we don't.
As I rarely paused live TV anyway, it was not a factor. Actually, other than Today in the morning and CNN at other times, we watch NO live TV. Every program is recorded and watched at our convenience. Then, all of those functions work fine. Try fast forwarding live TV through a commercial!

ncted

10-06-06, 12:37 PM

As I rarely paused live TV anyway, it was not a factor. Actually, other than Today in the morning and CNN at other times, we watch NO live TV. Every program is recorded and watched at our convenience. Then, all of those functions work fine. Try fast forwarding live TV through a commercial!

Amen. That pretty much describes my viewing habits as well. I hope it works!

Ted

djones18

10-06-06, 04:48 PM

I have a Cablevision provided SA8300HD DVR and I added a VANTEC NST-360SU-BK 3.5" eSATA + USB2.0 Aluminum External Enclosure with a Seagate SATA/300 500GB 16MB cache hard drive. After i plugged it in it wanted to format then reboot etc. After a couple of days, set recordings stopped working correctly, i had shows only record for segments of 37 minutes of a hour long show. I had some hour long shows break up into 3 seperate recordings. So I took it and exchanged it for a new one blaming the 8300 as faulty. And now i want to plug the external HD into this new model and wanted to know if anyone had any advice on how to not mess this up again.

I'm using a similar setup on a COX SA8300 HD/DVR with no problems. Not familiar with Cablevision's version of SARA software which manages your internal and external drives. However, if you've followed the plug-in, turn-on, format instructions described previously in this thread you shouldn't be getting the symptoms you note unless your Cablevision box is having problems.

Let us know how the new box works. Thanks.

broadwayblue

10-07-06, 12:23 AM

DoubleDAZ

10-07-06, 09:33 AM

There are at least 2 people who have successfully installed 750G drives, but most folks stick with 250G-500G drives, whatever happens to be on sale. :)

pepar

10-07-06, 09:54 AM

I just purchased an eSata enclosure and am planning on connecting it to my 8300. As far as hard drives go, what is the largest size that will work with the 8300?
I've got a 500gb attached. I've seen members posting success with a 750GB. (Review the last page of this thread.)

Also, I'm trying to determine exactly what features are lost when people talk about trickplay.
Rewinding and the ability to pause live TV and resume from that spot is lost. You can pause, but when you resume you are taken to the live program.

And am I correct that whatever these features include, they are still active when watching either pre-recorded programs or programs that are currently recording?Yes, you are correct.

broadwayblue

10-07-06, 11:36 AM

pepar and DoubleDAZ, thanks for the info. so it seems like the lost trickplay features aren't a big deal if you don't watch much live tv. and hopefully a future firmware upgrade resolves this issue....although i don't understand why they don't have the 8300 programmed to keep the live TV buffer stored on the internal drive. seems like that would solve the problem. for now, pressing record and then pause will work as a temporary fix, and is imo probably worth it to triple or quadruple storage capacity. i'll just have to remind the gf not to use the pause button when watching live tv. ;)

fcsmith

10-07-06, 11:42 AM

I just purchased an eSata enclosure and am planning on connecting it to my 8300. As far as hard drives go, what is the largest size that will work with the 8300? Also, I'm trying to determine exactly what features are lost when people talk about trickplay. And am I correct that whatever these features include, they are still active when watching either pre-recorded programs or programs that are currently recording?
Is your box running Passport or SARA (and what version)? Only Passport users lose the trickplay feature, which is the ability to pause and rewind live TV. These featues work fine on recorded material. In terms of the hard drive size, some have reported success with 500 and 750GB drives. I tried a 320GB Western Digital drive, and had problems with it (picture freezing and macroblocking). I switched to a Maxtor 300GB, and have had no problems since. I don't know if the size was the difference (some posters have suggested that going above 300 GB can cause problems), or if the Maxtor drive is just more suited to this application. My box is running Passport 2.5.066.

pepar

10-07-06, 11:43 AM

pepar and DoubleDAZ, thanks for the info. so it seems like the lost trickplay features aren't a big deal if you don't watch much live tv.
BINGO!

pepar

10-07-06, 11:45 AM

Is your box running Passport or SARA (and what version)? Only Passport users lose the trickplay feature, which is the ability to pause and rewind live TV.
broadwayblue's in Manhattan making him a TWC subscriber on Passport.

broadwayblue

10-07-06, 11:59 AM

Is your box running Passport or SARA (and what version)? Only Passport users lose the trickplay feature, which is the ability to pause and rewind live TV. These featues work fine on recorded material. In terms of the hard drive size, some have reported success with 500 and 750GB drives. I tried a 320GB Western Digital drive, and had problems with it (picture freezing and macroblocking). I switched to a Maxtor 300GB, and have had no problems since. I don't know if the size was the difference (some posters have suggested that going above 300 GB can cause problems), or if the Maxtor drive is just more suited to this application. My box is running Passport 2.5.066.

Crap...I was just about to buy a "Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200KS 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM" from Newegg. It's actually in my shopping cart. I figured there would be less chance of problems going with a "smaller" drive. Guess not.

And yes, as pepar stated i'm on passport with TWC in NYC.

pepar

10-07-06, 12:38 PM

Crap...I was just about to buy a "Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200KS 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM" from Newegg. It's actually in my shopping cart. I figured there would be less chance of problems going with a "smaller" drive. Guess not.

And yes, as pepar stated i'm on passport with TWC in NYC.
Just pay attention to the return policy or have a plan B purpose for the drive in case it doesn't work.

HRPretzel

10-07-06, 01:41 PM

fcsmith

10-07-06, 02:42 PM

Riverside_Guy

10-07-06, 03:07 PM

broadwayblue

10-07-06, 04:00 PM

FYI, the real sweet spot for drives (lowest cost per MB) is the 300-320 range.

Indeed I agree if you never watch live TV, losing the "pause and pick up there" bug is moot. But there is just a LOT of things I like to watch as they happen (new broadcasts, any sporting event) and I can still have some life away from TV by being able to pause the damn thing while I deal with whatever. Let us not forget that this particular feature was (and still is) heavily promoted as the main reason to get a DVR.

Oh, hasn't anyone ever watched a particular (football, whatever) play and while the broadcast shows many repeats from all sorts of angles, you want to see the original shot replayed... you know the one shot they seem never to replay? Does happen THAT frequently, but it sure happens.

So it sounds like the 300GB Maxtor is a good selection as far as price and compatibility are concerned.

The "Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM" is the same price ($90) as the Western Digital I was looking at, and it's only 20GB smaller. It would still effectively triple the capacity of my 8300.

Pausing live TV is absolutely one of the main features they advertise for the DVR. That said, I would have to believe they will eventually fix this bug.

As for wanting to see the original shot (the one they never replay) I agree. But I generally try not to watch sporting events live as I can't stand all the commercials. I usually start watching an hour or so after it starts. There is always the risk of being "exposed" to the live score...but I'm pretty good about staying away from those places during this time. For example, no ESPN.com once the Mets game just starts recording.

Or would I be better with this Maxtor?

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6V320F0 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

It's only $5 more than the 300GB model, but the Newegg reviews don't seem to be as good.

fcsmith

10-07-06, 04:06 PM

pepar

10-07-06, 04:10 PM

So it sounds like the 300GB Maxtor is a good selection as far as price and compatibility are concerned.

The "Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM" is the same price ($90) as the Western Digital I was looking at, and it's only 20GB smaller. It would still effectively triple the capacity of my 8300.
You will lose a not insignicant number (thanks Rummy) of bytes to "overhead."

broadwayblue

10-07-06, 04:15 PM

You will lose a not insignicant number (thanks Rummy) of bytes to "overhead."

But doesn't that same "overhead" apply to the 160GB drive that comes in the 8300?

pepar

10-07-06, 04:20 PM

But doesn't that same "overhead" apply to the 160GB drive that comes in the 8300?
Yes, and the DVR Info screen in DIAG reflects that. Mine loses around 10%. I've never done the math, but it "seems" like the external drive loses more than I'd have though it should.

broadwayblue

10-07-06, 04:36 PM

Yes, and the DVR Info screen in DIAG reflects that. Mine loses around 10%. I've never done the math, but it "seems" like the external drive loses more than I'd have though it should.

Ok. Having been talked out of the 320GB Western Digital I'm gonna go with this Maxtor:

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6V320F0 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16822144015)

Anyone using it with their 8300? Any idea how many hours of recording (assuming all HD) I'll have in total once it's connected?

BobKat6

10-07-06, 06:43 PM

Anyone using it with their 8300? Any idea how many hours of recording (assuming all HD) I'll have in total once it's connected?

Figure 8gig per hour. So 40 hours on the 320 and 20 hours on the internal 160 for a total of 60 hours.

hofs1

10-08-06, 01:03 AM

InvaderZim

10-08-06, 01:08 AM

Running w/ Sara

Ok so I picked up the Apricorn and I like it. It was a tight squeeze getting the 400gb seagate to fit. You can hear the fan but I did not find it to be too loud, writing to the harddrive was much louder than the low hum of the fan.

The Harddrive I used was the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 Sata 400 GB linky (http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/marketing/detail/1,1081,718,00.html)

When playing back recordings especially in HD the video and sound would pixelate and skip a second every 3 minutes or so. It became unbearbly annoying. I plan on returning the Harddrive and either trying another brand or scrubbing the project.

This is exactly the problem I had with the Seagate 7200.10 500GB drive that I tried when my original 300GB Seagate 7200.8 died after well over a year of service. I also have the Apricorn case, running SARA.

I think the size of the drive is the problem. I swapped the 500GB Seagate with a 300GB Maxtor secondary drive in my computer, and the Maxtor runs fine in the DVR, and the Seagate runs fine in the computer. The 300GB Seagate that died is finally back from RMA -- replaced with a 7200.10, and, BTW, given Seagate's much-vaunted 5 year warranty, it's annoying that they charge $25 for an RMA advance replacement rather than just take a credit card number and charge it if the dead drive doesn't show up 30 days. I'll probably stick that into a computer as well, and have a replacement ready if/when the Maxtor dies.

I've asked this before but don't remember the answer -- I wonder if there are revisions of the 8300HD that have different amounts of memory. The one I have is one of the earliest versions -- might more recenttly built machines have a few more MB of RAM, and therefore might they be able to handle a larger external drive?

segask

10-08-06, 05:11 AM

Ok. Having been talked out of the 320GB Western Digital I'm gonna go with this Maxtor:

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6V320F0 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16822144015)

Anyone using it with their 8300? Any idea how many hours of recording (assuming all HD) I'll have in total once it's connected?

well, as has been seen throughout this thread, one person can plug in a certain drive and it will work fine, and another will try the same exact drive in their 8300 and have problems.

I am currently using that Western Digital Caviar WD3200KS 16Mb cache SATA 2 that you were talked out of, with no problems. No freezing or pausing or pixellation or increased macroblocking. And, I've used it with two different enclosures now. Originally, the Apricorn DTS-EZ Sata and now, the Vantec Nexstar 3 eSata. The WD3200KS worked fine in both enclosures. I only switched to the Nexstar because the fan in the Apricorn was a bit too loud for my taste.

SUCCESS!
Western Digital WD3200KS 320Gb SATA
Apricorn EZ-BUS-DTS enslosure
Vantec Nexstar 3 eSata enclosure (drive worked fine in both enclosures)

Cox San Diego
SARA 1.88.19.1
my 8300HD internal drive is a Western Digital WD1600BB

Riverside_Guy

10-08-06, 09:29 AM

"Overhead" consists of several things. Traditionally, "K," "M," or "G" is a multiple of 1024, but drive makers sometimes figure it as 1000. You "lose" there right away. Next, they quote unformatted, remember in order to find stuff, things like "sector headers" need to be written. Plus there needs to be space taken up to hold a "directory" which tells the system where stuff exists. The area for the "directory needs to be sufficiently large to accommodate lots of small files AND also take into account that a single file can be located at many different places (fragmented).

Anyway, that should give some of you an idea of what is going on. BTW, over the course of many years I have used a lot of different disk drives (generally speaking having very good luck with all of them except for the very early Barracuda's, those things ran so hot one could fry eggs on them!). In 24/7 service I have a pair of Maxtors that run fairly cool, are not too noisy and seem solid. If I would configure an external drive, it would be a Maxtor.

c1courtney

10-08-06, 01:14 PM

FYI, the real sweet spot for drives (lowest cost per MB) is the 300-320 range.

As I pointed out last week this is not necessarily the case ---

"My observations, is that the 400-500GB drives are becoming the optimal GB/price drive w/ sale pricing.

Especially when you consider a couple factors. 1.) You're going to loose 20GB worth of space when you use it as an eSATA drive on the SA8300HD. 2.) You need to add in the cost of the encloser in you accounting.

w/ encloser
$95 320 -> 300/($95+$40) -> 2.22GB/$
$120 400 -> 380/($120+$40) -> 2.37GB/$
$160 500 -> 480/($160+40) -> 2.40GB/$

If you don't count the cost of the encloser then it's almost a wash, might as well go with the bigger drive.

w/o encloser
$95 320 -> 300/($95) -> 3.16GB/$
$120 400 -> 380/($120) -> 3.16GB/$
$160 500 -> 480/($160) -> 3.00GB/$

Note, these are all prices that I've seen on SATA drives w/ sale pricing between BB, CC, and Fry's over the past couple of weeks.

CCourtney"

I was questioned on the 500GB HDD, but once again this weekend another store has it on sale for $159 (CompUSA)

CCourtney

DoubleDAZ

10-08-06, 01:33 PM

Don't you just hate it when something being "on sale" skews the numbers? :)

Actually, since the cases are all $40, they are a really moot point, but skew the $/G and shouldn't be a consideration when looking for lowest $/G of external storage. Obviously, if the 500G is on sale, it will most probably be the cheapest solution. However, when not on sale, it appears that the $/G is running around $3.16 no matter what the drive size is. So, there may no longer be a "sweet spot" cost-wise at all, now that external storage has become more mainstream.

However, didn't I read something quite awhile ago when we were discussing $/G at the time that showed the overhead actually varied with drive size, larger drives having more overhead? The 20G overhead assumption could be wrong and further skew $/G comparisons.

The bottomline for me is that the cost difference is not enough to worry about and I'd just go with what feeds my need at the time. :)

broadwayblue

10-08-06, 01:57 PM

well, as has been seen throughout this thread, one person can plug in a certain drive and it will work fine, and another will try the same exact drive in their 8300 and have problems.

I am currently using that Western Digital Caviar WD3200KS 16Mb cache SATA 2 that you were talked out of, with no problems. No freezing or pausing or pixellation or increased macroblocking. And, I've used it with two different enclosures now. Originally, the Apricorn DTS-EZ Sata and now, the Vantec Nexstar 3 eSata. The WD3200KS worked fine in both enclosures. I only switched to the Nexstar because the fan in the Apricorn was a bit too loud for my taste.

I guess what works for one will be a disaster for someone else. Now I'm back to square one. Maybe I'll just flip a coin to decide it. I guess my biggest concern is that 320GB drives in general are not too large to work with the 8300...many posts seem to indicate that 300GB or less seem to work better. At least Newegg has a good return policy.

broadwayblue

10-08-06, 02:00 PM

In 24/7 service I have a pair of Maxtors that run fairly cool, are not too noisy and seem solid. If I would configure an external drive, it would be a Maxtor.

And I was orignally drawn to the WD because they seem to tout operating temperature as one of their biggest features:

"Cool - Cool operation results in the highest reliability, even in intensely hot environments such as digital video recorders. That's why these, the coolest on the market, are the drives of choice for the world's leading consumer electronics and PC manufacturers."

chudak

10-09-06, 01:10 PM

After reading quite a bit about expansion drives for my 8300 SD here and elsewhere, I decided to take the plunge on friday. Frys didn't have any Western Digital drives since Maxtor and WD merged so I got the 500GB Maxtor SataII drive and an Adaptec drive enclosure. Everything went together in about 5 minutes and I plugged it in. It asked if I wanted to reformat the new drive and I said yes.

Curiously, it didn't seem to work correctly at first. The DVR menu wouldn't show the new storage space and although the system diagnostics showed the drive, it showed 0 bytes available space. So after waiting a sufficient period for the drive to be formatted I powered off the cable box again and started it back up. This time, everything worked correctly and it started recording to the new drive.

My used space went from about 90% to about 8% :)

InvaderZim

10-09-06, 01:26 PM

chudak

10-09-06, 01:41 PM

I think Maxtor and Seagate merged.

Please report back on whether you have the occasional pixelization problem -- a stutter every 3 minutes or so (assuming you're on SARA), both during playback of recorded shows and watching live TV through the box. I'm gung-ho to try 500MB again, maybe with a non-Seagate drive if enough others have success.

Figures. I asked the guy at Fry's why they didn't have any WD drives and that's what he told me. He also couldn't explain why the OEM version of the drive I got was $30 more than the retail box version. However, when I got to the register, it turns out that the $299 price on the box was wrong and the drive was actually $170 :D

I've watched a few dozen hours of programming over the weekend and I didn't notice any irregularities in either live tv or recorded shows that I hadn't seen prior to the drive addition. And, based on the recording algorithm (record to the drive with the most free space) it seems that all of the live tv recording as well as the shows I recorded all ended up on the external drive.

The drive does run warm but it has plenty of space around it for the enclosure to radiate away the heat.

And, FWIW, I have the 8300 not the 8300 HD and am on Cox in San Diego. I'm pretty sure that I recall seeing that the software is sara in the system diagnostics.

cuzzin

10-09-06, 11:35 PM

Hey all, I am kind of just learning about being able to hook up a SATA drive. I really want to get going with this, only I kind of need some guidance on making sure I'm headed in the right direction. If this thread wasn't nearing 3,000 posts, I'd be happy to skim through it for an answer, but you can't really skim 3,000 posts, and I pretty much just need the basics cleared up for me. Now, I do have the 8300HD from SA, but I'm not sure on which drive to buy. Does it really matter? Is any SATA drive appropriate? I saw this one at Best Buy (http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Internal-WD5000KSRTL/dp/B000FBSREK/sr=8-9/qid=1160440004/ref=sr_1_9/102-1503791-0146525?ie=UTF8&s=electronics) and figured it might work. The salesman there didn't have a clue about it so I wanted to hold off on buying it until I had confirmation this would be compatible. Is there another SATA drive that would be recommended I use instead? Also, is there anything else I will be needing to buy in addition to the SATA drive? And finally, is hooking it up to the 8300HD just plugging in connectors or is it more complicated? I really appreciate and help on this. Thanks in advance.

broadwayblue

10-10-06, 12:06 AM

That drive should work fine...but you could get it a few $ cheaper from Newegg or ZipZoomFly to name a couple places. You'll also need an external enclosure which runs about $40 or so.

cuzzin

10-10-06, 12:23 AM

All right thanks. I was just noticing how it was labled an "internal" drive rather than external so I wasn't sure if that would be a problem. So I guess I can go buy it tommorrow.

BobKat6

10-10-06, 01:39 AM

cuzzin

10-10-06, 01:59 AM

OK, am I able to just walk into a store and buy all the equipment I need or do I have to buy everything online? Would stores like Best Buy or Frys have what I need? Also, I'm getting kind of mixed up with all the SATA, eSATA, SATA II stuff. Which ones do I need to be compatible with my 8300HD (which runs SARA)?

BobKat6

10-10-06, 03:11 AM

Riverside_Guy

10-10-06, 11:24 AM

I think you should be able to get all you need at a store if you get a salesman "with a clue".

Oxymoron.

There seems to be 2 schools of thought, buy a more expensive total plug and play solution of buy a bare drive, a box and put them together. Both work perfectly fine, there is NO "thing" that makes one work and the other not (i.e. the marketing, such as "formatted for streaming video" is just that, marketing). It's all about your comfort level.

Keep in mind that there are issues involving external drives that have zero to do with the hardware.

chudak

10-10-06, 12:39 PM

cuzzin

10-10-06, 01:53 PM

You can assemble your own solution and you will find that it is cheaper. The maxtor plug and play quickview expander is about $250 for 300GB. I payed less than this for 500GB putting my own system together.

Just as a data point, you should be able to get a 500GB drive for about $170 and an enclosure for $40-50 so you are looking at about $220-230. Most of the newer SATA enclosures come with an eSata cable that plugs right into the SA 8300.
Yeah thats what I'm thinking of doing. I saw a Western Digital Internal 500GB drive at Best Buy that I'm most likely going to buy today. Is the enclosure for it also something that can be bought in Best Buy or do I have to find that somewhere else?

chudak

10-10-06, 02:00 PM

Yeah thats what I'm thinking of doing. I saw a Western Digital Internal 500GB drive at Best Buy that I'm most likely going to buy today. Is the enclosure for it also something that can be bought in Best Buy or do I have to find that somewhere else?

I got both the drive and enclosure at Fry's. Best buy may have the enclosures as well but since I refuse to shop at BB, I couldn't tell you for sure. ;)

Just make sure that you get an enclosure that is eSata. There are alot of enclosures that are USB 2.0 only or USB 2.0/Firewire.

dougef

10-10-06, 04:55 PM

I bought a complete package about a year ago, long before I found this thread. It has worked flawlessly. Here is the link:

http://discountechnology.com/8300HD-eSATA-Hard-Drive-for-Scientific-Atlanta-8300HD-DVR-250GB?sc=2&category=22

If you browse their site, they sound like they really know their business.
As I would prefer a "take it out of the box and plug it in solution" this is appealling to me. You say it has been running for a year - any problems at all? Any issues with heat? - that seems to be a concern expressed by many here.

I had not heard of "netegriti" before - anyone know is someone else makes the drives for them?

Thanks.

ncted

10-10-06, 05:42 PM

I just hooked up my WDXS2500JS. I now have ~360GB of space, up from 149GB prior to hooking up the external drive. The 8300HD recognized it right away, asked me if I wanted to format it, formatted it, and gave me a warning about shutting down the 8300HD for 10 seconds prior to disconnecting it.

Interestingly, the trick play functionality did not disappear right away. It was only when I changed channels that I lost that functionality. Swapping over to the other live buffer, trick play was still available over there too. Obviously, this doesn't really matter in that the functionality goes away as soon as one changes channels or a recording is made on a given buffer, but I thought it was interesting to note for the software savvy out there.

Anyway, so far, so good. Since not much is on tonight, I have scheduled a bunch of stuff to record, so I can test it thoroughly, check for pixelation, etc. I'll report back when I have a better idea of how it does.

Ted

BobKat6

10-10-06, 06:33 PM

As I would prefer a "take it out of the box and plug it in solution" this is appealling to me. You say it has been running for a year - any problems at all? Any issues with heat? - that seems to be a concern expressed by many here.

I had not heard of "netegriti" before - anyone know is someone else makes the drives for them?

Thanks.

No problems at all. It does run warm and the drive hums (about 60db, no fan). I use a 1" thick piece of plastic foam as insulation when I want to lay a DVD case on top of it. It would be cooler mounted vertically. However, it looks like DiscounTechnology is now selling the drive in an aluminum case. Mine is plastic. I only hear the drive when there is no other sound in my Family Room. With the TV on I can only hear it in Mute.

I never heard of Netegriti before either. I found the seller very cooperative with telephone questions. They do carry some "name" drives and may swap one for you.

BobKat6

10-10-06, 06:42 PM

Oxymoron.

There seems to be 2 schools of thought, buy a more expensive total plug and play solution of buy a bare drive, a box and put them together. Both work perfectly fine, there is NO "thing" that makes one work and the other not (i.e. the marketing, such as "formatted for streaming video" is just that, marketing). It's all about your comfort level.

Keep in mind that there are issues involving external drives that have zero to do with the hardware.

Note disclaimer on Cooldrives.com. "Note: Assembly of Drive Enclosures requires both mechanical and computer skills (THERE IS A RESTOCKING FEE ON ALL RETURNS)

and

"Before purchasing any enclosure please verify any compatibility issues either with existing hardware or software as ALL ENCLOSURE SALES ARE FINAL. Due to the volume of uninformed purchases, enclosures can be returned FOR WARRANTY REPAIR ONLY. *** Please use our Pre-Sales support online-form for any questions concerning enclosures".

I consider myself "Technologically Challenged" with a low comfort level.

Paul Chiu

10-10-06, 08:51 PM

ncted

10-10-06, 09:28 PM

I had this issue raised over in the NYC Cable thread and it's this.

VERY SERIOUS STUFF!

In a few years.
What if your 1GB External drive is now loaded with all the HD shows you treasure. Stuff that are not in the stores as Blu-Ray or HD-DVD.

One day, the 8300HD DVR you used to record the stuff onto the external drive was accidentally short circuited by a Starbucks Latte and it's Kaput!

You go to the cable store and took home a new 8300HD and upon connecting that external drive with all the oldies but goodies, you get prompted with "Do you want to format this Drive?"

CAN THIS HAPPENED?

Has anyone here tried taking their external drive loaded with stuff and connect it with another 8300HD DVR?

Please say it works...... :o :o :o

IF NOT, I really don't see any point in using an external anymore....

Thanks,

Paul

This should not work. It is a DRM/Copy Protection scheme designed to keep you from making illegal copies of copyrighted HD content.

Ted

cuzzin

10-10-06, 09:34 PM

OK, new question: how the hell do you connect the SATA drive to the enclosure? I can't seem to find where to get the "80pin ATA cable & 4 pin power cable in the seat of the HDD," as stated in the manual for the enclosure. I bought a Seagate 500GB internal drive(http://www.officemax.com/max/solutions/product/prodBlock.jsp?prodBlockOID=1611340633) and a Coolmax enclosure (http://www.coolmaxusa.com/productDetails.asp?item=CD-311&details=features&subcategory=U2&category=3.5). Are these two not compatible or something. I didn't think putting the drive inside the enclosure would be any harder than just putting it inside the enclosure. Please help me!

ncted

10-10-06, 09:49 PM

cuzzin

10-10-06, 10:02 PM

OK, thanks but which one will I need to return in order to get the correct item? Is either one going to be compatible with my 8300HD? Is the enclosure or the SATA drive the problem here?

ncted

10-10-06, 10:51 PM

OK, thanks but which one will I need to return in order to get the correct item? Is either one going to be compatible with my 8300HD? Is the enclosure or the SATA drive the problem here?

Well, the drive is definitely a problem. ST3300631A is a Parallel ATA drive. There is a SATA version of this drive, the ST3300631AS which may or may not work. I am no expert on what will or won't work beyond the basics.

The enclosure looks like it should work, but only experimentation with a proper SATA drive with say for sure.

There are a lot of drives listed on this forum that people have gotten to work, but the most commonly recommended one is a Maxtor QuickView, like this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144421

Ted

cuzzin

10-10-06, 11:00 PM

Well, the drive is definitely a problem. ST3300631A is a Parallel ATA drive. There is a SATA version of this drive, the ST3300631AS which may or may not work. I am no expert on what will or won't work beyond the basics.

The enclosure looks like it should work, but only experimentation with a proper SATA drive with say for sure.

There are a lot of drives listed on this forum that people have gotten to work, but the most commonly recommended one is a Maxtor QuickView, like this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144421

Ted
OK, so the problem definitely lies in the hard drive? That's the main thing I need to know so I know which one to return. I hope I can find one of those Maxtors at Fry's.

ncted

10-10-06, 11:10 PM

OK, so the problem definitely lies in the hard drive? That's the main thing I need to know so I know which one to return. I hope I can find one of those Maxtors at Fry's.

One way to make sure is to look at the connector on the drive. Does it look like this:

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/directron/sata1large.jpg

or like this:

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/directron/sata2.jpg

The first one is PATA, the second one is SATA. You want SATA.

Ted

jruhnke

10-10-06, 11:17 PM

Has anyone here tried taking their external drive loaded with stuff and connect it with another 8300HD DVR?

Please say it works...... :o :o :o

IF NOT, I really don't see any point in using an external anymore....What you're asking for is an archival solution--a way to store programs you want to keep, indefinitely, the way you might have recorded a program on a VHS tape and put it on the shelf.

This DVR is not indended to serve that purpose. It's intended to allow you to record shows so that you can watch them later, at your convenience, and then delete them to make room for more shows. If you want to archive stuff, keep your VCR or buy a DVD recorder.

The point of adding an external drive is simply to have more flexibility. You can hold more programs before running out of room. If you're going to be gone for two weeks, for example, and you don't want to miss all your favorite shows, the extra drive might be the only way to hold everything.

I use an external drive, and actually do use it for semi-archival purposes. Basically, I keep a handful of movies on hand, in case I feel like having a "movie night". With 8 or 10 popular movies in the bank, there's a fair chance of finding something good to watch. It's like my own personal version of "video on demand". (I have had some programs recorded for over a year.)

But if the box conks out and all that stuff is lost, it's no sweat. I'll just get another box, and within a few days or weeks, I'll have another dozen movies on tap. No biggie.

jruhnke

10-10-06, 11:40 PM

OK, so the problem definitely lies in the hard drive? That's the main thing I need to know so I know which one to return. I hope I can find one of those Maxtors at Fry's.cuzzin, I looked at the links you posted, and the enclosure you bought appears to accept either an IDE / PATA drive (like the one you bought) or a SATA drive (like most people have used for this application, and like ncted assumed your enclosure required). The encosure has electronics to adapt the PATA drive to a SATA interface, so you should have what you need to install the drive in the enclosure, connect the enclosure to your 8300HD, turn everything on, and see if it works.

HOWEVER...

1) If you're unfamiliar / uncomfortable with the idea of connecting the cables necessary to plug in a hard drive, you may have bitten off a little more than you wanted to. Still, this ain't rocket science, and if you look at the pictures in your installation instructions (http://www.coolmaxusa.com/computers/311userManual.pdf) and examine the parts in front of you, you should be able to figure it out.

2) Folks have had trouble with adding external drives to the 8300HDs, even under the best of conditions. It's definitely a "your mileage may vary" situation, and no one can give you a recipe for drive/enclosure combos that's 100% guaranteed to work.

3) Your selection of drive and enclosure is not the greatest. Having the conversion between PATA and SATA interfaces *could* introduce problems that will keep your setup from working.

If you've already opened all the boxes and packaging, then you don't have anything to lose by plugging everything in and seeing if it works...if you can decode the instructions and figure out how to put it together.

If you haven't opened everything up, you might want to do a little more research, make sure you know what you're getting into, and then decide what your next step should be.

cuzzin

10-11-06, 02:06 AM

cuzzin, I looked at the links you posted, and the enclosure you bought appears to accept either an IDE / PATA drive (like the one you bought) or a SATA drive (like most people have used for this application, and like ncted assumed your enclosure required). The encosure has electronics to adapt the PATA drive to a SATA interface, so you should have what you need to install the drive in the enclosure, connect the enclosure to your 8300HD, turn everything on, and see if it works.
If my enclosure DOES have connectors to adapt to my hard drive, I sure as hell can't find them. From what I can tell, all that was included with the enclosure was a bunch of different cables, a power plug, and some screws. There is no where on the hard drive that has inputs to match the plugs coming from the enclosure. If there is some way to connect these two, I can't find it.

1) If you're unfamiliar / uncomfortable with the idea of connecting the cables necessary to plug in a hard drive, you may have bitten off a little more than you wanted to. Still, this ain't rocket science, and if you look at the pictures in your installation instructions (http://www.coolmaxusa.com/computers/311userManual.pdf) and examine the parts in front of you, you should be able to figure it out.
I would gladly connect them, I just don't know what to connect. I almost think there is nothing to connect. I seriously think these two aren't compatible or something.

2) Folks have had trouble with adding external drives to the 8300HDs, even under the best of conditions. It's definitely a "your mileage may vary" situation, and no one can give you a recipe for drive/enclosure combos that's 100% guaranteed to work.
Yeah, but at least most of them know what to look for when buying all this stuff. I seriously thought I had all this down and I knew what to buy and everything. Guess not. There must be one or two drives/enclosures that are more popular among users than others. I might like to look into some of them.

3) Your selection of drive and enclosure is not the greatest. Having the conversion between PATA and SATA interfaces *could* introduce problems that will keep your setup from working.
Yeah, see if this isn't a good combination to be working with, I don't want to work with it. I'm kind of anal about having the best of the best. I was just kind of shopping blindly in this situation. And would a conversion between PATA and SATA cause a degrade in quality of the recordings? I wouldn't want anything like that either. Like I said, I had no idea what to be looking for when buying a drive/enclosure. I figured just buy a drive with a lot of memory and an enclosure to go with it (the salesman recommended the enclosure actually). If you can at least recommend a better device for each, I'd appreciate it. I thought connecting the drive/enclosure would be as simple as plug in the drive to the enclosure and then plug in to the 8300HD. Guess not.

If you've already opened all the boxes and packaging, then you don't have anything to lose by plugging everything in and seeing if it works...if you can decode the instructions and figure out how to put it together.

If you haven't opened everything up, you might want to do a little more research, make sure you know what you're getting into, and then decide what your next step should be.
Yeah, I have opened all the packages already. I would try to plug everything in, but like I said, I have NO idea how the enclosure is supposed to connect to the hard drive. I cannot find any matching connections.
Thanks a lot for your help, you have at least shed some kind of light on this subject, but I am still pretty confused about some things. So, in yoiur opinion, should I take both items back or just one of them? Also, next time I go shopping what are the main things I need to be looking for when I buy my hard drive/enclosure? Thanks again for your help.

jruhnke

10-11-06, 08:45 AM

If my enclosure DOES have connectors to adapt to my hard drive, I sure as hell can't find them. From what I can tell, all that was included with the enclosure was a bunch of different cables, a power plug, and some screws. There is no where on the hard drive that has inputs to match the plugs coming from the enclosure. If there is some way to connect these two, I can't find it.Check your private messages, and reply to me directly. I've got some pictures I want to send you via email to see if that helps.

Riverside_Guy

10-11-06, 09:47 AM

Unfortunately, the only way for "us" to figure out a lot of the eternal drive stuff is to try and see what happens. Still, I agree that we should not think of it as any sort of "long term archival" method. I like jruhnke's approach, just to have some stuff around in case. I've long since made the step that I'm going to pay for cable service, part is bare necessity (like in urban area, OTA just is not an option at all) and part is desire (movie channel premiums). As such, everything today is here tomorrow. If I "miss" movie X for whatever reason, it will return at some future date.

I had suggested elsewhere that one interesting experiment was to try using 2 different external drives on the same STB... i.e. swapping boxes for additional content. Fill drive 1 with movies, swap in drive 2 for more recordings. Then want to watch something from drive 1, plug it in etc.

HOWEVER, I also find this whole implementation to be highly flawed. It's like they exposed some truly alpha code and then tried completely disclaiming it. As such, we can have a lot of very different experiences because there's little or no consistency factor is such code. One person could accomplish swapping boxes without issue, the guy in the next house could try the same thing and wipe everything he had recorded out.

pepar

10-11-06, 09:58 AM

Note disclaimer on Cooldrives.com. "Note: Assembly of Drive Enclosures requires both mechanical and computer skills (THERE IS A RESTOCKING FEE ON ALL RETURNS)

and

"Before purchasing any enclosure please verify any compatibility issues either with existing hardware or software as ALL ENCLOSURE SALES ARE FINAL. Due to the volume of uninformed purchases, enclosures can be returned FOR WARRANTY REPAIR ONLY. *** Please use our Pre-Sales support online-form for any questions concerning enclosures".

I consider myself "Technologically Challenged" with a low comfort level.
It will not be the enclosure if there are "compatibility issues" - it will be the drive or cable. Cooldrives sells only pre-assembled RAID arrays and not bare drives that you would mount in an enclosure.

pepar

10-11-06, 10:02 AM

I had this issue raised over in the NYC Cable thread and it's this.

VERY SERIOUS STUFF!

In a few years.
What if your 1GB External drive is now loaded with all the HD shows you treasure. Stuff that are not in the stores as Blu-Ray or HD-DVD.

One day, the 8300HD DVR you used to record the stuff onto the external drive was accidentally short circuited by a Starbucks Latte and it's Kaput!

You go to the cable store and took home a new 8300HD and upon connecting that external drive with all the oldies but goodies, you get prompted with "Do you want to format this Drive?"

CAN THIS HAPPENED?

Has anyone here tried taking their external drive loaded with stuff and connect it with another 8300HD DVR?

Please say it works...... :o :o :o

IF NOT, I really don't see any point in using an external anymore....

Thanks,

Paul
This has been covered repeatedly here.

1. Have low or no expectations that you will be successful attaching an external drive.

2. If you get it working, have low or no expectations that it will continue to work.

3. Be prepared at any time to lose ALL recorded content.

Temporary as it MAY BE, h-def makes my display come alive and I will continue to use an external drive even if I lose everything - again.

pepar

10-11-06, 10:06 AM

HOWEVER, I also find this whole implementation to be highly flawed. It's like they exposed some truly alpha code and then tried completely disclaiming it. As such, we can have a lot of very different experiences because there's little or no consistency factor is such code. One person could accomplish swapping boxes without issue, the guy in the next house could try the same thing and wipe everything he had recorded out.
Sorry, R_G, but your premise is flawed: Support for the SATA port is NOT implemented. Period. Beyond that, everyone who has expectations, has unrealistic expectations not based on reality. And I say this in the kindest way. :)

davehancock

10-11-06, 11:36 AM

RE: R_G's expectations:

First it looks like HIS expectations are beyond what the DVR developer (SA) had intended - particularly in regards to interchangability/portability. SA documentation is fairly clear on their limited intent.

Second, His cable system is using third party software (Passport) that has in no way indicated that it is supporting the external drives. So, as pepar points out, his expectations should be Zero.

ionfield

10-11-06, 04:25 PM

I know this subject has been touched on before and that I am most likely out of luck, but I am hoping someone knows where I can get some help.

I have a 1TB LaCie eSATA external drive attached to a SA8300HD DVR. Yesterday, the 8300HD was replaced due to poor picture quality. The new box no longer recognizes the movies and programming that are on the external drive.

The cable company tech said he did not know how to make the new box recognize the data on the ext. drive so I called Sci. Atl. tech support to see if they could help me. I was told that the data on the drive is strongly encrypted and tied to the serial number of the previous 8300HD, and that there is no way to get a new 8300HD to see the recorded data.

I was also told that he was not allowed to help me in any way to do this on my own, which leads me to believe that there is a work-around somewhere out there that will allow a new box to recognize this drive.

I have approximately 500 GB of programming on the ext. drive most of which I have not yet had time to view. Does anyone know of a hack or a site where I might be able to find the info in order for me to get the new box to recognize the previously recorded data?

Thanks.

chudak

10-11-06, 04:36 PM

Paul Chiu

10-11-06, 04:52 PM

ionfield

10-11-06, 05:16 PM

Thanks, guys.

I find it absolutely unacceptable that Scientific Atlanta would install an encryption system on their products that do not allow for the recovery of data on an ext. drive when their product fails.

I understand the need for content protection and Sci. Atl. and the cable company's fear of being sued for copy-righted content theft, but when they create DRM safeguards, to me, it is unconscionable for them to not allow the legal transfer of data, or in this case, a new box recognizing what was legally saved to a hard drive with an old box and no longer being accessible to the new box when it is the fault of their product.

What ever happened to the customer comes first? It appears to me that as far as Scientific Atlanta is concerned, the customer only comes first if it does not conflict with everything that is important to them; with the end-user customer being way down on that list.

pepar

10-11-06, 05:26 PM

Another non-reader.

Paul Chiu

10-11-06, 05:26 PM

As you can see, the cable companies will screw us more as many of us are willing to get screwed. Many are willing to accept less for more and more money. This is what is sad.

In your case, I am sure that there is a work around. I do not have the answer but you should write and call until your cable provider get you to the department that knows how the system works.

Good luck to you

Paul

Thanks, guys.

I find it absolutely unacceptable that Scientific Atlanta would install an encryption system on their products that do not allow for the recovery of data on an ext. drive when their product fails.

I understand the need for content protection and Sci. Atl. and the cable company's fear of being sued for copy-righted content theft, but when they create DRM safeguards, to me, it is unconscionable for them to not allow the legal transfer of data, or in this case, a new box recognizing what was legally saved to a hard drive with an old box and no longer being accessible to the new box when it is the fault of their product.

What ever happened to the customer comes first? It appears to me that as far as Scientific Atlanta is concerned, the customer only comes first if it does not conflict with everything that is important to them; with the end-user customer being way down on that list.

davehancock

10-11-06, 05:41 PM

As you can see, the cable companies will screw us more as many of us are willing to get screwed. Many are willing to accept less for more and more money. This is what is sad.

In your case, I am sure that there is a work around. I do not have the answer but you should write and call until your cable provider get you to the department that knows how the system works.

Good luck to you

Paul
What makes you so damn sure that there is a work around?

In the first place, the box had to be designed with that encryption in order for the premium TV services (HBO, etc.) to allow the box to record their programs at all. Also, the encryption is the same as used on the internal drive. When you install an external drive, it is, in a sense, an extension of the internal drive.

Then there is the fact that no US cable company "supports" the external drive at all. Some will acknowledge that the capability is there - but NONE that I know of will support it in any way.

None of the "regulars" here work for a cable company. Some have done Beta testing for their local cable company. We do try to help, which includes telling people what works and what doesn't.

I believe it is against AVS Forum policy to discuss hack methods.

If you have issues with the cable company, and in particuar with features that they never claimed to offer - GO SOMEWHERE ELSE (Dish/DirecTV perhaps)!

ionfield

10-11-06, 05:47 PM

chudak

10-11-06, 05:55 PM

A lot of you, even the gurus on this forum seems to work for the cable companies. It is strange that some of you think it's ok for the external drive off the 8300HD to be wasted in case of 8300HD failure.

Some of you make up these excuses for the cable companies such as:

1. Oh, it's the encryption system, that's how it works
2. You out of luck, the DVR wasn't meant as a archival device
3. I don't mind, I just wanted a large drive to record stuff while I am gone for a month

We are here to help each other solve a major problem here.

That's pretty funny considering that I'm an independant software consultant and have never worked for a cable company in my life.

I in noway endorse or make excuses for any DRM related behaviour that you experience with an SA 8300 or any other DVR for that matter. However, I would almost guarantee that this is the source of this particular problem.

Remember, cable companies aren't thinking about YOU, they are thinking about themselves and the people that could sue them. You are just an afterthought that provides them revenue. If they don't piss you off sufficiently, you'll continue to supply them that revenue.

And, FWIW, I'd suggest you cruise on over to the Tivo forums and read up on what has or will happen to TivoToGo in the Series 3. Trust me, it appears that Tivo has the same problem with not being able to get your content off the unit, for backup purposes or otherwise due to the DRM restrictions being forced down their throat by the entertainment industry. If you truly want a DVR that you control, you'll have to build yourself a MythTV box since even Microsoft's solution is riddled with DRM controls.

pepar

10-11-06, 06:09 PM

[QUOTE=pepar]Another non-reader.

__________________
...peparsplace.... - Updated 7/13/06 - 8300HD: assembling, attaching and formatting an eSATA drive
QUOTE]

Thanks, Pepar,

I checked your Web site, but could not find what I was looking for. If the point of your link was to teach me how to format my ext. drive, I am well aware of how to format the drive with the SA8300HD. What I want to be able to do is have the new 8300HD recognize the programming already stored on the drive. Any idea where I can find that kind of information?

Thanks.
A moment of pique from reading Paul Chiu's rant - which was subsequently edited by the admin - caused me to be short with my answer. The material you recorded on another box is . . gone . . never to be seen again. The encryption is box-level. That is a known risk when using an external drive.

ionfield

10-11-06, 06:40 PM

[QUOTE=ionfield]
A moment of pique from reading Paul Chiu's rant - which was subsequently edited by the admin - caused me to be short with my answer. The material you recorded on another box is . . gone . . never to be seen again. The encryption is box-level. That is a known risk when using an external drive.

Thanks again, Pepar,

Actually, the material I recorded is on the ext. harddrive. And, although, the encryption is box-level, the recorded data resides on the ext. drive.

According to Sci. Atl. tech support, the encryption is tied to the serial number of the 8300HD box. I have both the old and new serial numbers. Surely, with the amount of time that the 8300HD has been out someone already figured out how to crack this problem. Any idea where I might go in order to find that info? I just want to recover the approximately 500 GB of programming I already legally recorded and is now inaccessible to me.

Paul Chiu

10-11-06, 06:45 PM

I would be very disappointed if there were no work around.
If you think there is none, you are fooling yourself.

As a ISF Calibrator, are you willing to tick off the cable providers?
I take your views here with prejudice.

This thread is to discuss the problem with the 8300HD and external drives. It is the right place to vent. You don't like it. You go somewhere else.

BACK TO THE PROBLEM AT HAND.

We cannot accept that the external drive cannot work with a new 8300HD DVR or future HD DVR as:

1. We are reading the recorded content. We are not duplicating it. This is key.

2. This is a DVR- Digital Video Recorder. It does not say "Time Shift Machine Only".

3. As a Recorder, the recorded material should be safe guarded for as long as you need it. That's the function of a recorder.

4. If we can use the firewire to a D-VHS recorder, many would. This is mandated by the FCC and written in law. The cable companies have already broken the law here by making the 1394 plugs on the 8300HD to no longer work with current D-VHS recorders.

5. TIVOs can off load content onto various mediums. Sure, that's with standard definition content but TIVO is working on something similar for high def content for their TIVO Series 3.

Call your cable rep and demand that the external drive content is safe guarded and also demand that the 1394 or USB of your 8300HD can off load coded HD material onto a backup medium.

What makes you so damn sure that there is a work around?

In the first place, the box had to be designed with that encryption in order for the premium TV services (HBO, etc.) to allow the box to record their programs at all. Also, the encryption is the same as used on the internal drive. When you install an external drive, it is, in a sense, an extension of the internal drive.

Then there is the fact that no US cable company "supports" the external drive at all. Some will acknowledge that the capability is there - but NONE that I know of will support it in any way.

None of the "regulars" here work for a cable company. Some have done Beta testing for their local cable company. We do try to help, which includes telling people what works and what doesn't.

I believe it is against AVS Forum policy to discuss hack methods.

If you have issues with the cable company, and in particuar with features that they never claimed to offer - GO SOMEWHERE ELSE (Dish/DirecTV perhaps)!

pepar

10-11-06, 07:08 PM

[QUOTE=pepar]

Thanks again, Pepar,

Actually, the material I recorded is on the ext. harddrive. And, although, the encryption is box-level, the recorded data resides on the ext. drive.

According to Sci. Atl. tech support, the encryption is tied to the serial number of the 8300HD box. I have both the old and new serial numbers. Surely, with the amount of time that the 8300HD has been out someone already figured out how to crack this problem. Any idea where I might go in order to find that info? I just want to recover the approximately 500 GB of programming I already legally recorded and is now inaccessible to me.
Well then, haved at 'em. :D

pepar

10-11-06, 07:12 PM

davehancock

10-11-06, 09:48 PM

I would be very disappointed if there were no work around.
If you think there is none, you are fooling yourself.

Even if there was one - the AVS Forum is not the place to discuss it.

As a ISF Calibrator, are you willing to tick off the cable providers?
I take your views here with prejudice.

Well, I've got ZERO business with, or through the cable company - so that has nothing to do with it. I am in the business of dealing with customers - not cable companies. For those customers with cable, I am able to offer additional help with their DVRs. But that is it. And for you to imply otherwise is wrong.

This thread is to discuss the problem with the 8300HD and external drives. It is the right place to vent. You don't like it. You go somewhere else.

I was here, and participating a long time before you came here and started ranting. Senseless rants from people who have unreasonable expectations do not help those trying to make the most of their 8300s.

BACK TO THE PROBLEM AT HAND.

We cannot accept that the external drive cannot work with a new 8300HD DVR or future HD DVR as:.....................

YOUR cable company (unless in Canada) never claimed that they supported the external drive! Therefore you have no reason to expect transferability of programs if you change boxes or any other functionality associated with the external drive. If you do have such expectations, it is clear that you have not been reading this thread!

Paul Chiu filter = IGNORE

DoubleDAZ

10-11-06, 09:49 PM

The solution is to tie the recordings on both internal and external drives to the subscriber's account, not to a specific DVR. They could then allow any drive "expert" (cableco, local computer shop, etc.) to transfer recoverable files from an old, broken drive/DVR to a new one and all the DRM requirements would still be met. I'm not a Tivo fan, but if anyone can get this mess fixed it will be them, DVRs are their only business AFAIK.

ncted

10-11-06, 10:24 PM

What ever happened to the customer comes first? It appears to me that as far as Scientific Atlanta is concerned, the customer only comes first if it does not conflict with everything that is important to them; with the end-user customer being way down on that list.

I think you hit the nail on the head here, albeit a bit askew. SA's customers, at least in the US, are the cablecos, not you and me. I can assure you the cablecos don't give a darn about your lost recordings. They don't give a damn about eSATA support either. All they care about is being able to market a product and make some bucks off it. We should all thank SA for the mere existence of an eSATA port on the 8300 to whine about. :)

Ted

PS- This is why I have 2 DVRs, in case something goes awry with one of them, I have most of what I wouldn't have watched yet somewhere else.

jruhnke

10-12-06, 12:45 AM

Preface: I neither work for nor have any particular love for my cableco (if you doubt me, go check out the TWC-Houston thread, and search on my name!).

I do, however, have an affinity for rationality, and a substantial dislike for the belief some folks seem to hold that they are entitled to have the world simply behave the way they think it should behave.
I would be very disappointed if there were no work around.
If you think there is none, you are fooling yourself.Regardless of whether there's a workaround or not, I can 100% guarantee one thing for you:

Everyone on this thread right now is either completely ignorant of this supposed workaround, or else is not going to post about it due to AVSForum restrictions on such topics. It is utterly pointless to continue asking for "help" on this subject here, so please just drop it.BACK TO THE PROBLEM AT HAND.Reference previous comment.We cannot accept that the external drive cannot work with a new 8300HD DVR or future HD DVRIf you truly "cannot accept it", you have one and ONLY ONE acceptable course of action: Don't use the 8300HD. That's how the box is designed to work, period. Until someone votes you in as God or the CEO of your cableco, you're not going to be able to change that simple fact.2. This is a DVR- Digital Video Recorder. It does not say "Time Shift Machine Only".

3. As a Recorder, the recorded material should be safe guarded for as long as you need it. That's the function of a recorder.Your logic is flawed. Who cares what it's called? If you didn't have an external drive, and your box conked out, you'd still lose all the recorded programs on the STB. Similarly, if your external drive conked out, you'd still lose its programs. So regardless of whether the drives are encrypted, you're always at risk of one simple failure knocking out a chunk of your recordings.

Your argument implies that the cableco should "guard" against those failures, too, and that's just silly.

No one signed a contract with you guaranteeing to protect your recorded material against loss. You are acting as if they did, and thus you are out of line.Call your cable rep and demand that the external drive content is safe guarded...Good grief, I certainly will not. Next, will you suggest I call my grocery store, and demand that they sell me bread that won't get moldy and tomatoes that won't rot?

The cableco is a business. It offers you a service, for a price. If you think it's a good deal, you may choose to pay the price and enjoy the service. If you think the deal is lousy, you are free not to give your money to the cableco, and not receive their service. However, they are under no obligation to listen to your "demands" about how they run their business, nor are they obligated to give you whatever deal *you* think is fair.

Get a grip, folks. We're talking about reruns of Frasier and the Hallmark Movie of the Week, not precious family heirlooms or the title to your house. If you lose your shows, it's really not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.

But if you disagree, and truly believe that your recordings *really are* that doggone important, then go find some other recording solution that meets your mission-critical data integrity requirements, instead of trying to get your cableco to redesign the ~$15/mo 8300HD to your satisfaction.

Bottom line: No one owes you anything regarding 8300HD data integrity. That's not how the world behaves. Insisting otherwise--no matter how loudly or annoyingly you do it--does nothing to change that fact.