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Dish Network enables external storage, Ethernet port on DVRs

Dish Network subscribers with ViP622 HD DVRs can finally breathe easy and not worry about accidentally erasing any shows -- as rumored, the satellite company stealthily enabled the Ethernet port and support for external USB 2.0 hard drives last night. Using your own storage isn't as simple as just jacking in a random hard drive and recording away, however: Dish will charge you a $39.99 "activation fee," you can't daisy-chain drives, and content you archive on the external drive will have to be manually moved to back to the internal drive in order for you to watch it. You can use as many drives as you want, though, so you can have separate drives for movies and sports, but we'd have much rather had all this stuff managed automatically. Upgrades should be rolling out now, let us know when you get your in comments!

[Thanks, Art]