8300HD and External SATA - It Works!! - Page 134

Hitting the record button is a work-around, not an answer. "Trick play" means you are ONLY dealing with the buffer. It does involve many more button presses to accomplish the basic goal (plus you have to remember to go back into the recorded programs list and delete it).

I though I was clear, it has to do with pause and resume without FF or RW. Several have said you can NOT do that, one has said you can.

Oh boy, that REALLY throws a monkey wrench into things! Honestly, it wasn't that I disbelieved manatus, but his "it works for pause/resume" did contradict several other posts I had read, so I was only looking to see if it WAS the current condition. Not sure it means anything, but he and I are on totally different head ends.

Coming from you, I'm sure that you made sure that you didn't watch and delete some content from the internal drive and thus got back the functioning; it sure was my impression that this came about because the 8300 was writing it's buffer to the external drive.

Could we have had a fix for this issue without any new version delivered? So I just spent 15 minutes going through the service menus (interesting tidbit, it lists a "CPU type" as usparc, that seems really good news to me!) and the only date information I can find that even vaguely relates to the software is a June date for the application and a May date for the OS.

I just wonder how many folks here have gone and installed PCI cards in their machies to access external drives via a SATA/eSATA connection? My guess would be very few.

If you call, most cable companies will tell you that they "don't support" external drives - even when it works. "Support" to them means that they will help you with any problems - which no cable company will (or, at least any US cable company that I've heard of). It won't hurt to call, but don't take their "not supported" answer as THE answer.

I think the working theory was that, as long as newly recorded content was going to the external drive, live VCR functions were broke and that when newly recorded content returned to the internal drive those functions would return as well. My experience lends weight to that theory.

Got my Seagate eSATA today 500G. I liked it because it also comes with a PCI eSATA card so I can use this drive in my PC in the future should I want to.

Anyway after plugging everything in and rebooting the SA (SARA) , I formatted the drive and off I went!

I will post into on line database when I have had some recordings go onto the external drive.

Thanks to all for the guidance.

Congratulations! Try recording a hi-def show and then watch it noting any glitches while recording TWO hi-def shows. (That's when the "system" is working the hardest.) And then watch each of those noting any glitches. For further - accelerated - testing, record hi-def content on it filling it as quickly as possible. When it's nearly full, repeat the previous test I mentioned. If it's gonna fail, it would do it on one of the tests.

Rosewill RX353S enclosure using a Seagate 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB HD w/ 16MB Cache. I added it to the database.
I've noticed some people didn't get it to work. I did, but only after many tries. The first time I tried, it crashed the whole PVR with an ERROR and it counted down from 255 to 0 in binary, it was quite scary. I hard booted it and it came back to life.
Here's the trick to getting this drive to work:
This drive comes in SATA-I mode with a jumper to limit the speed to 1.5 MBps. Remove the jumper, then connect it to your PC and initialize (not format) the drive.
Then you can hard-boot the PVR with the hard drive and it will format, then hard boot again and it recognizes it.

Edit: It worked the first hour or so I used it, but then I started a recording today and the box crashed again. So I've disabled it for now.

Glad that worked for you, but as we don't really know why a drive/enclosure combo works fine for some and not at all for another with (seemingly) identical gear, your procedure also may not produce the same results for someone else who's had that combo fail. But again, glad it's working for you!

Ahhhh. That why your post flummoxed me a bit... it sounded like the bug got fixed. Indeed I am aware of that "theory" AND find that it makes actual sense, despite the fact that "sense" and "cable company" shouldn't be used together in the same sentence!

Methinks the hardest stress is recording 2 HD at the same time WHILE playing back a third HD show. I've actually done that; it's supposed to work that way and it does!

I'd be cautious about the glitches though. Those interruptions sure as hell happen when no external drive is attached. In the past 6 months, I recall 2 times where it was so bad and frequent, I couldn't watch it at all. And I recall numerous times I see very minor and momentary glitches, ones that don't obscure any dialog (and ones that might "hide" half a line).

Not sure anything has changed in the past 6 months, but I did read some comparisons regarding SATA I and SATA II (150 vs. 300). The benchmarking seemed to demonstrate that the II drives achieved their top speeds (which was NOT double a I system) only in short bursts. Over the course of time, they averaged almost identical I/O times to the I drives.

If you think about writing HD video to disk, you'll see that it needs steady far more than it needs burst speeds.

SA giveth and SA taketh away. After a few more movies being recorded (on the internal drive), live TV trick play is once again gone . . .

UForgotten, the part where you initialize the drive on a PC, do you need to use a Sata 2 controller, or did you just use Sata? I have a 7200.10 that I *hoped* to replace this weekend, but the bad weather out west has delayed my new drive...got a bit of time to play with and your "fix" intrigues me.

Thanks,

germar

A SATA300 drive should automatically drop back to SATA150 data rate when connected to a SATA150 controller. If not, you can force SATA150 with a jumper.

The enclosure I bought has a dual esata/usb backplane. To make things faster I just used the USB port to my PC, just to make sure the drive was alive.
It might not _need_ to be initialized, but it didn't partition the drive until I did.
I think the SATA 2 jumper may have helped.

Edit: The box still crashes mid-recording. Just took longer for it to do it this time. If it was glitching, I could live with it. But it takes the whole PVR down with an error and then it counts down from 255 to 0. Had to unplug it twice to resurrect it.

Has anybody had luck with eSATA external drives with TW San Diego 8300HD devices? I have searched this very long thread and can't seem to find any reference. And if so, could someone reccomend an enclosure and drive that is "known " to work. I can't wait to get started if it's working with TW SD and passport 2.5.066. Any help would greatly be appreciated. Thanks!

So far, the SA8300 external drive capability is only dependent on the software. All SARA supports it, and newer versions of Passport (yours included) support it with some limitations. So check out what works for the Passport users here - no matter where they are.

Ha ha!

lane87: It's all good. Pretty much any drive works with Passport. I can't recall any Passporters having compatibility issues. I do have a recommendation that you get an external enclosure with no circuitry between the drive and the 8300HD. That is an oblique way of saying: No other outputs than eSATA, though I've seen posts from members who'd been told by vendors that the USB circuitry . . in an enclosure they were selling . . "didn't affect the SATA datastream" - in essence "in parallel" My second recommendation, and one that I am less exercised about, is that it have active cooling, i.e. a fan.

It would behoove you (always wanted to say that ) to read the first post and all the links you find there. The more you know, the better.

lane87 I certainly don't disagree with pepar's advice about enclosures. But it's distinctly possible that TW and its software could some day disable the use of external drives, in which event you might want to be able to put your drive and enclosure to another use. If that would involve hooking them up to a PC and your PC doesn't support SATA drives, having an enclosure with both eSTATA and USB ports would be a good thing. I'm using two eSATA/USB Apricorn enclosures with my external drives and haven't had any problems.

lane87: That's also good advice to consider. There are no guarantees that the drive will work "forever" or even . . now. Having a ready Plan B is not a bad idea.

If you have a recently purchased/built PC, there's a good chance you have a (spare) SATA port onboard. Unless you have a packed case, there's a good chance you have physical space as well. If that is the case, then an enclosure with USB output is not necessary.

Read a lot, specifically enclosure specs, and ask any question that comes to mind.

Check out this link, $.40/G:

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/art...=Breaking+News

Good stuff! Thanks.

Thanks for the quick reply and great info guys! I'm a CS guy and work for HP and have built many of a PC. If I can ever help anyone on thier HP stuff just ask and I'll try my best.

Since I have several enclosures sitting around but they are all usb/firewire combos it's no sweat getting one more dedicated to eSATA just to have some extra storage (for X amount of time) for the DVR. So I guess I'll drop a $138 and go for it. Based on the first post, I had this sitting in my basket at newegg and it should do fine considering the performance of perpendicular drives and a nice 16MB buffer.

AZiO ENC311SU31 3.5" eSATA + USB 2.0 External Enclosure - Retail
Model #: ENC311SU31

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

If that's not a good decision please advise. Off to CES 2007 in the morning and would like to get this ordered before I go. Love having packages at the door when I get home from trips. :-) I'll be sure to check out that Hitachi drive while I'm there as well.

Thanks again guys.

Being in the PC biz, you should be familiar with the expression YMMV. My mileage has been very varied with the same drive in the 500GB version. Reading this thread it has been abundantly clear that some people have had successes with the same drives/enclosures where others have failed. So the best I can say is good luck.

No SARA user has had success with PRT drives. And you will be, I think, the first Passport user to try. Or at least the first to post his intentions to use a 7200.10 drive. Please keep us "posted!"

(Personally, I'm betting you'll have success.)

Remember, he's on Passport, and that (seems) to make all the difference in the world.

He probably will -- that's the same drive (the Seagate ST3320620AS) that I've been using successfully under Passport. But I bought it before learning of the PRT/7200.10 issues under SARA. Since we don't yet know what incompatibility problems Mystro/Navigator will introduce, I don't think that I'd repeat that purchase today.

Arghhh, I actually had the chance to demonstrate this a long while back when I got 2 300 drives to use with a system that didn't support 3.0G at the controller point. I just jumpered them for 150 from the git go instead of seeing for sure that it would drop to 150. I HAD read some stories about 300 drives not being recognized by a 150 controller.

I too noted that the value (cost/MB) seemed quite good. I'n actually hoping that all of them get T drives on the market, because that might move the best value/sweet spot point (lowest cost/MB) from the current 300-320 to 500.