8300HD and External SATA - It Works!! - Page 3

Great to hear! I've got the cable and an enclosure on the way, hopefully I'll be able to report success later this week.

So has anyone determined how to use the external SATA port to provide 'infinite storage?' In other words, to swap drives indefinitely?

The way I see the current setup working, you have an internal drive and the SATA drive. The DVR menu shows what total programs you have archived, without showing what program is on which drive. Now let's say you fill the SATA drive and decide to swap it out for a new empty SATA drive. What does the DVR menu show now? Only the stuff you archived on the internal drive? Or does it look for the full list and crap out if it can't find anything on the new SATA drive?

Most likely it builds the list when it first powers up. From reading the manual, it sounds like you won't be able to do any hot swapping of drives. My guess is that power cycling with a new external drive attached will rebuild only the recordings on the internal plus currently attached external drive. My cable and case haven't arrived yet, so I don't know for sure.

No ... it'll just show the stuff on the internal drive (unless it's an external drive you've saved stuff too before). You can (power down / swap / power up) at will.

Bit of a PITA though. This was not meant for archiving ... if you want archiving get a D-VHS recorder.

Kool Thread!

I am having my Comcast Digital Cable with the HD-DVR tomorrow. Does anyone know if Comcast uses the SA 8300HD or not?

Anyways.. I will surely be looking at the "internals" of this DVR and explore its "potentials" - not that I want to be able to offload programs to a PC or to burn -- but rather to expand my storage. Does anyone know if the OS on the SA8300HD is Linux?

Reason I am getting DVR-HD is so that I will no longer miss my favourite HD broadcasts .. and just watch them say on weekends...

That's a catch 22, though, because the firewire ports are inactive on this STB, rendering the DVHS option moot. So your only way of archiving is by swapping SATAs or by getting a monstrously huge SATA up front.

Depends on the area. I have Comcast in the Baltimore area and they are using the 8000HD. Apparently they are rolling out the 8300HD in the May/June timeframe.

Okay.. what's the difference then between the 8000HD and the 8300HD? Is the SATA drive expnadability also available on the 8000HD?


WOW Cable in our area is already using the SA8300HD from what I've heard.

Nope, the 8000HD doesn't have the SATA connector. I've got WOW in Illinois, and just had my 8000 swapped out for an 8300 over the weekend and ran across this thread. Great timing! My cable and enclosure have been ordered, so I should be able to find out later this week if it works.

LYU370

Was it easy with WOW to request a replacement? I will probably get the 8000HD s- I 've asked a friend of mine who lives about 20 milles from where I'm at and gad his HD-DVR installed a few days ago - he says he has the 8000HD and Comcast is not even entertaining the idea of replacement with the 8300HD..

CongratZ on your 8300HD..

BTW.. reading through the PDF file of the 8300HD.. it appears it has both FireWire and USB. Has anyone figured out yet what those connectivity options are for?

No, the OS is SciAtl's own ... PowerTV:
http://www.powertv.com/developers/PowerTVOSDocs.htm

This is great! Thanks! I'm a cablevision customer on the Norwalk CT system and it worked for me! It recognized the drive as you said. I haven't recorded any additional program as of yet but the disk useage bar has gone from 71% down to 49% (80gb HD). What happens if you take the external disk to another 8300HD? Will it be reformatted or will the other 8300HD play what's been recorded on it?

As posted before, the other 8300HD will not play the stuff because the content is encrypted with the key specific to your original DVR.

Has anyone found another source for the SATA I to SATA II cable? The link in the first post (Cruz Systems) charges shipping and a $5 handling fee. What is the correct terminology to use when searching for a cable? "SATA II Cable"?

Sometimes that's the problem with these smaller outfits, shipping costs almost as much as the part.

Those are for "Future Enhancements". Of the 5 SA digital cable boxes I've had in the past 3 years, all had USB ports, 3 had FireWire, and none of the ports were ever activated in the software

I was searching for the same thing last night and the only other place is here:

External 3' SATA1 to SATA2 cable

But unfortunately it is not available to buy from addonics site yet.

From what I read, by this summer, you should be able to find these SATA2 cables or even enclosures everywhere.

I just had my DVR installed and it's not a SA8300HD but a Motorola DCT 6412. I guess there goes my expandability options. But on the other hand I thought I've read somewhere that the Firewire port on the 6412 is active and their are tricks available to backup via this port.

Has anyone with recordings on their SATA drive tried plugging it into their computer? Are they recorded as ts files? Will the computer read them?

Foxbat121, have you gotten the SATA to work with cox fairfax?

yetkat,

As mentioned many times now, the files stored on these discs are encrypted. Not possible to playback on PCs. I've not yet ordered any parts because I feel uneasy to have to call to place my order for the conversion cable. I'll probably wait for the true SATA II external enclosure rather than current SATA 1.0 ones.

For those who don't live near a Frys, Circuitcity.com has the Western Digital 300GB 7200RPM w/8MB Buffer for $169 AR.

Go to circuitcity.com and type WD3000JBRTL in the search box.

That looks like an Ultra ATA/100 drive.

Outpost.com has the Maxtor SATA 300GB drive for $199.99. At least they did when I ordered yesterday.

I would hesitate to plug the drive into my PC if it contained recordings I cared about. WinXP writes some kind of signature to a drive when it's mounted. I know this signature makes a TIVO-formatted drive unreadable by TIVO, which is why you should never boot XP while a TIVO drive is attached (I did that once, but fortunately had a backup). The same may apply to the SA8300HD-formatted drive, although hopefully it would just reformat the drive when it's once again connected to the 8300HD.

Nope. In fact, I always use a generated one-time use only CC number for online purchases. I just don't like phone orders. The other reason is that I want to wait for the true SATA II enclosure so that I can use it on my PCs if I decided not to use with 8300HD. From what I read, true SATA II external enclosure should have different signal level and shielding for reliability and maintain maximum possible speed compared to SATA 1.0 enclosure (which is basically a hack as SATA 1.0 spec does not include external enclosures).

Hi,
I'm in Austin too and just got an 8300HD from TWC here. Were you abeot find out if the external SATA feature works here?
thx.