8300HD and External SATA - It Works!! - Page 284

Originally Posted by Lotus_Nut

After reading that the latest Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drive (WD1002FAEX, with the 64 MByte buffer and SATA 3 interface) seems to be working as an external drive for these DVRs, I have decided to create a bare drive setup for my 8240 HDC, and the parts are ordered.

My only question is for those who have this drive running successfully, without significant glitches, what jumper settings did you use? (I couldn't find this explicitly addressed in any of the posts.) Particularly, the jumper for PHY Enabled (pins 5-6), that supposedly forces it into a SATA 2 mode (3 Gb/s), instead of SATA 3. (It seems this drive doesn't have a way to force it into a SATA 1 mode, but, maybe the SATA interface chip set in the DVR does support speed negotiation, unlike some really old SATA 1 chips.)


By-the-way, I decided to add some very quiet cooling fans to my entertainment center electronics cabinet. There will be two exhaust fans at the top, and two intake fans at the bottom. The bare drive will be placed on a home-made heavy stand with foot pads right next to one of the intake fans so that it will have cool air constantly blowing across it. After a lot of searching for extremely quiet fans with acceptable airflow and very long life, I decided on the Scythe S-FLEX 120 mm fans. I purchased them from coollerguys.com.
http://www.coolerguys.com/sff21.html
I will be running the fans, the disk drive, and a programmable thermal fan controller (also from Coolerguys) from a single power supply that provides 5A of 12V and 2A of 5V. (The fan blowing over the drive will be always on, not through the thermal fan controller.)
http://www.coolerguys.com/840556090885.html
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...ef=oss_product

Originally Posted by kamatz

Hi everybody,
I have a SA8300HD+ with Videotron and recently I connected an external HDD WD1001FALS with NST-300SU-BK enclosure. The external drive was recognized by the SA, it have been formated (it' been very quick though, less than 1 minute!!) and it does show that I have 16% used memory comparing to 75% when the eHDD was not attached. So far it seems like all OK for the eHDD: recognized, formatted, 16% used when is connected vs 75% when is not connected.
The problem I have is that even though is showing that is recording a channel, I am not able to actually see that recording in the end. I was tring to "stop and save the recording" while recording and it seems like it just dissapeared. Or, while recording I cannot play it from the begining...
Do you guys have any ideea what's wrong in here?
Another weird thing, I putted to record 2 minutes one show and stopped it and save. Then I was able to see it in the list but it couldn'tbe played...

Please help 'cause i'm going nut here...

Thanks a lot in advance!

Kamatz.

Originally Posted by Lotus_Nut

I just installed a factory new (never used) Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB drive, model WD1002FAEX, on my SA 8240 HDC with the Passport software. I configured the drive as a bare drive (on a little stand) with an eSATA to SATA adapter cable, an external power supply and very quiet fan, not in an enclosure, as per my posts on Oct. 16 (hence, no enclosure interface electronics in the way). It worked!

The performance is at least as good as my internal drive. I even tried simultaneously recording two HD shows to the external disk (I had filled up my internal) while playing back an HD show from the external disk. I didn't have any glitches in playback (well, not beyond what I would normally get from the internal drive).

What worked:
1) Connect the SATA cable plug to the external drive, power up the drive and fan, but don't connect the eSATA cable plug to DVR. I didn't have any jumpers installed on the drive. I waited a few minutes for the drive to fully spin up.
2) Power cycled DVR (unplugged, waited 10 seconds, plugged back in). Turn on DVR and wait for it to fully boot (not just clock showing, but also done booting according to the TV display).
3) Hot plugged in the eSATA end of the cable into the DVR.
4) At this point the DVR recognized the drive, asked me if I wanted to format it, asked me to confirm a few times, and formatted it within a few minutes. After formatting, I checked the available space and it had dropped from 70% used with just the internal drive to 9% used with the external drive connected.

Other notes:
a) The first time I tried it, I plugged in the eSATA cable into the DVR before powering up the DVR. The DVR booted, but didn't recognize there was an external disk. Hot plugging in the eSATA after the DVR was fully booted and the drive was on did work. Apparently the DVR needs to see a signal that there is a new drive after it has already booted. I didn't try having the DVR fully booted with the drive off and eSATA plugged in, and then turning on the drive. That might be something the next person could try.
b) After the drive was initially working, the DVR power cycled itself (off then immediately on) after about 10 minutes of running. I don't know if that was due to adding the external drive, or if the DVR power cable wasn't fully seated. I pushed the power cable in hard, and haven't had a problem since (after 24 hours of operation), and hopefully won't again.
c) With the very quiet fan I am using (Scythe S-FLEX 120 mm), the drive stays cool, which should help it live a long life.

Originally Posted by einhorn

Can anyone help with this scenario:

There's something you really want to seeso much that you're having guests over Could be the super-bowl or the Lost finale. You schedule the recording.

Guests arrive, and you start to watch the show while its taping. The usual scenariosyou pause..maybe rewindmaybe at some point check something on another channel before going back to your show.

At some point further into the show the playback just stops. At this point you might be 20 minutes into a 2 hour show but that's all that's been recorded. The fast forward/rewind shows red beyond where you are, even although you're an hour into the show and the DVR shows that it's still recording. So you've lost 40 minutes of the show and there's nothing you can do except switch to the live recording and try to guess what's occurred.

Just to cover the basics:
-A cold boot was done an hour before the show.
-Device has an external SATA drive which was built using hard disk and enclosure that gave me the greatest number of reported Passes for my cable co. in the compatibility database.
-Both internal and external drives are less than 50% used


I recall looking into this at some point in the past and found a post where someone mentioned that if you're watching a program that you're currently recording, you shouldn't simply switch to that channel and watch, you should instead switch to the DVR playback channel (in my case 998) and select the program from the menu. I've tried this, and I've also tried watching the channel directly. In both cases the problem has occurred. But I can't give a set of steps that will always reproduce it.

We all know that the SA boxes are quirky and underpowered, their HDMI and SATA interfaces have been problematic, and their firmware releases are usually two steps forward, one step back.

But I'm thinking that there must be some sequence of steps that you can take to minimize this problem. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
SARA: 1.92.10.1
External drive: Caviar Black 1Tb housed in Antec 3 case (exact models on compatibility list)

One more note: most of the time the device works fine...I can record two HD broadcasts and playback a separate HD recording without it missing a beat. The only problem I ever have is trying to watch something while its recording.

Originally Posted by Bryan_CoxPHX

Go with a WD Caviar Black series up to 1TB MAX. Using No Enclosure.

Here is a PDF Parts List Set-Up with No-Enclosure. You can delete the fans if you like or just use the aluminum as a heat sink.

Originally Posted by seracious

The DVR doesn't have the same problem from its internal drive that runs out through the same HDMI. It never hitches that way, just from content recorded on the external.

I suppose it could be the cable or the eSATA connection on the DVR unit.

Originally Posted by DigitalfreakNYC

That's not working on my current SA DVR.

Originally Posted by Bryan_CoxPHX

You are running TWC Navigator correct?

The poster "seracious" is running SARA 1.91.36.103, SARA should have no issue with the set-up. If for some reason it does not work, I would swap out the DVR.

Originally Posted by davedlv

... just put together a DVR expander using a formula I found on another forum - WD Black Caviar FAL1001FALS, Rosewill RX-358 enclosure and a SIIG eSata cable. My DVR is a SA 8240HDC running Passort Echo software on a Cox network. ... the activity light on the drive/enclosure is flashing continuously and the drive has been spinning the last several hours since I powered up. I'm not recording and the DVR drive does not appear to be active though it is powered on. I'm curious as to whether this will be the norm or whether something is still going on with the the drive setup.

Originally Posted by davedlv

I'm new to the forum and just put together a DVR expander using a formula I found on another forum - WD Black Caviar FAL1001FALS, Rosewill RX-358 enclosure and a SIIG eSata cable. My DVR is a SA 8240HDC running Passort Echo software on a Cox network. The initial setup went normally with the formatting prompt and the available recording space increasing from 72 to 98%. However I notice the activity light on the drive/enclosure is flashing continuously and the drive has been spinning the last several hours since I powered up. I'm not recording and the DVR drive does not appear to be active though it is powered on. I'm curious as to whether this will be the norm or whether something is still going on with the the drive setup. Thanks for any help.

Originally Posted by davedlv

If I had to do it again, I would go with the enclosure-less setup - the flickering of the activity light seems a little distracting!

Originally Posted by Bryan_CoxPHX

Cox's New Guide IPG (Passport Echo 3.1) is always buffering the last two channels you tuned to. Even with the DVR turned OFF.

Unless you Select in Settings - Hard Drive Power Management:
Do one of the following:
If you want the power to the hard drive to remain on, highlight the Always On option.
If you want the power to the hard drive to turn off one minute after the set-top box turns off, highlight the Off with Set-top option.

However, regardless of which setting you choose I believe the Ext. HDD will always be powered and spinning, just not buffering.

Originally Posted by davedlv

Thanks for your input, Bryan. I usually leave the box power on at all times because I have assumed that it has to be on to do a scheduled recording when I'm not actually watching the TV. If that's the case, the "black tape treatment" will take care of the minor distraction of the flashing light.

That said, I'm thinking seriously about converting to your set-up (no enclosure) since it seems to have a lot of advantages.

Originally Posted by davedlv

I'm new to the forum and just put together a DVR expander using a formula I found on another forum - WD Black Caviar FAL1001FALS, Rosewill RX-358 enclosure and a SIIG eSata cable. My DVR is a SA 8240HDC running Passort Echo software on a Cox network. The initial setup went normally with the formatting prompt and the available recording space increasing from 72 to 98%. However I notice the activity light on the drive/enclosure is flashing continuously and the drive has been spinning the last several hours since I powered up. I'm not recording and the DVR drive does not appear to be active though it is powered on. I'm curious as to whether this will be the norm or whether something is still going on with the the drive setup. Thanks for any help.

Originally Posted by the_erv

I have for the last 2-3 years used 3 different hard drives with the SA 8300HD. The first was a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB drive in a Ultra enclosure. After the drive began getting about half full, I upgraded to a 1TB Fanthom Drive. I burnt all of the recordings that I wanted to keep to DVDs. After using the 1TB drive until it became about 82% full, I decided to upgrade to a 2TB drive. But on this upgrade, I wanted to keep the recordins and move them to the new Fanthom 2TB drive that I bought. I let the DVR format the 2TB drive. Now I connected both drives via USB to my computer running Windows XP. In order to move the data, I hunted for a copy program that would perform sector to sector copy. I downloaded the freeware program, Easeus Fisk Copy from download.cnet.com to move the data. Sector to sector copies will take a long time to perform. Although I forget the time involved, I would say to expect 10-18 hours. I placed the 2TB drive on the Dvr and it worked flawlessly. By the way, I have not had any problems with any of the drives that I have used. The 2TB drive was a "Fantom GF2000EUR G-Force External Hard Drive - 2TB, eSATA, USB 2.0, Refurbished" for $100 from TigerDirect.com. I have been using the 2TB drive for about 2 months. I hope this information is of use to someone.