Hollyman’s World blog

Update Dec 9, 2008: I thought I would post one more recent update to this thread, as it seems to be fairly popular with visits and there are still many posts on the DirecTV forums asking about external drives. My setup has been flawless so far. The drive stays cool to the touch, makes no noise and has never had a problem losing shows. I’d consider this experiment a success and the extra data for shows has been invaluable to us.

Update: It’s been a few weeks now using the new drive. All things work great and even seems a bit faster with response times. As of right now I have:

• 40 30-minute shows in SD
• 15 1-hour shows in SD
• 16 1-hour shows in HD
• Total: 34 hours SD and 16 hours HD
• Space remaining: 89%

Bring on the Olympics!

I’ve been a subscriber to DirecTV for the past 8 years. Last year we were forced to purchase a new TV when lightning stuck near the house and killed my 1995 Sony 27″ Trinitron… R.I.P.

We upgraded to HD and received the DTV HR20-700 HD DVR. While this was a fantastic upgrade in picture quality, it was also a downgrade from my previous DirecTV Tivo unit. I still miss the quality of the Tivo, but DTV is getting much better with their own DVR software.

Anyway, with the French Open Tennis ongoing and the 2008 Olympics coming up, there is no way we can continue to get by with the 320GB internal drive. That only holds approximately 50 hours of MPEG4 HD video and with so many HD channels on DTV now, it is very easy to fill that up.

So, I finally decided to try to add an external eSATA drive to expand my storage capacity. Searching on the DTV forums web site I found many articles like this one:

http://forums.directv.com/pe/action/forums/displaypost?postID=10370752

Many of the articles there will refer you to this external site:

http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=92029

I decided that the Costco WD MyBook 1TB was probably not the way to go, after hearing all the stories on the forums (although I am quite sure that non-technical people just plug things in an expect them to work, then cry when they don’t understand what’s happening…).

Anything less than 1TB in the upgrade would be useless.

I ended up heading over to microcenter and picked up a WD Caviar GP 1TB SATA hard drive and a Nexstar 3 external SATA->eSATA/USB case for it.

The nice thing about the case is, no fan to make lots of noise (let’s hope the case and heatsink can keep the drive cool enough) and it also has USB, so I can easily use it on my laptop if things fail to work for some reason.

I open the drive and change the jumper setting to drop it down to 1.5Gbps from the default of 3Gbps. According to posts on the dbstalk.com forum.

I then mounted the drive on the case tray, which was very easy to do. Just slide it into the sata connector and use the provided screws to hold it in place.

Here is a picture from the back of the external case. It has a power switch, USB and eSATA connectors.

After I put it all together, which simply consists of sliding the drive tray into the case and securing it with 2 screws, I tested it on my MacBook Pro with USB. It was recognized OK, but had no filesystems on it. I left it unformatted and went into the family room to test on the DVR.

I used the DTV menu to reset the box. Once it was rebooting, I pulled the power plug on the DTV DVR.

I plugged the power cord in for the new drive and connected the drive to the DVR using the eSATA cable that came with the case (that cable is about 2.5 feet long, BTW). I turned on the drive for a few seconds so it could power up, then plugged the DVR power cord back in again.

The DVR booted up and while it was booting, I could see the blue light on the external drive case flash on occasion. Once the system was up, everything seemed to work OK. I had no previous programs, since they are on the internal drive and that is no longer in use. while watching live TV, I could see the activity light on the drive flash as it was writing out the live buffer to disk.

Sweet!

I had to remove the drive after this little test, so my wife would not miss any of the programs on the internal drive. I simply reset the DVR, unplugged the power and removed the eSATA cable. When the DVR rebooted, it had all of our previously recorded programs on the internal drive.

Next I took the drive back to my office and plugged it into my laptop again, using the USB port. The drive showed up, but OS X can’t mount any of the partitions on it. I examined the drive with Disk Utility. Here are the screenshots of the new partitions for the DVR drive. The layout of the 3 partitions is:

• 517MB
• 15GB
• 916GB

I will post some follow-up with stability information once I have this setup running for a while.