From what we can tell, this is just marketing hoopla to get you to buy a drive "certified" for use in a particular application; in all actuality, users
can connect any USB 2.0 external hard drive to their DISH Network HD DVR and expand their storage capacity for a one-time fee. Nevertheless, Western Digital has just let loose its 500GB My DVR Expander, which "more than doubles" your available recording hours by storing up to 300 hours of SD content and 60 hours of high-def goodness. As predicted, the drives work with the satcaster's ViP family of HD DVRs, and WD is apparently looking to expand the brand to other carriers as soon as they get with the program and enable USB storage. Those willing to fall for this ploy can procure the half-terabyte drive for $149.99, but considering that the port activation fee is still charged, we can't imagine looking elsewhere first.
[Via
FarEastGizmos]
posted May 16th 2008 2:20PM
Can this thing be used with the Comcrap DVR ? i never even looked
With all these broadcast flags controlling what your DVRs can and cannot record, what's the purpose of expanding DVR storage? Content providers will have their way and continue to limit what you can and cannot record. All these recent "accidental flags" are BS and just a test of what content providers really want to do which is to force you to buy episodes. Can you say double-dipping?
DVRs are being crippled every day so think twice about expanding your storage as you may not need it.
Yet another whining conspiracy theorist.
Funny, I've never had a problem recording ANY program for timeshifting purposes using a Time Warner crapbox DVR, Tivo HD, or Tivo Series 3. This includes premium content from HBO, Cinemax, et al.
Now, copying programs off the DVR for viewing on other devices like a PC, PSP, iPod, etc. may be a different story, but again, aside from my premium channels I haven't had any problem ripping content for portable use from my Tivo via Tivo Desktop. And the 500GB expansion drive I have attached to my Tivo HD allows me to record 86 hours of HD goodness, or 800+ hours of SD programming - very useful.
In other words, your argument that these DVR expansion drives are useless is 100% pure bunk. You can record whatever the hell you want with your DVR, it's making it portable that may or may not be the problem with certain providers.
I already have this same exact external HDD, but will be damned if I'm going to throw away the BS activation fee to Dish just for them to throw a switch and allow me to use it. What a sham!
This is a CG, right? Anyway, a polished version would be a lot hawter than the one I'm currently using (which is starting to look quite ugly now v_v).
It's not CG, the new MyBooks are slightly smaller and have a glossy piano black finish, with no power button >.<
I have 2 of the new ones, 4 of the old ones.
are you guys from Mars?
External drive technology has advanced farther than platter drives.
This so-called advertising or infomercial is nothing but another shot at emptying shelves of old-fashion products.
In the industry, hard or software, we say that once it's on the shelves, a product is outdated. Why? Because the industry does NOT wait for marketing and customers, they use them.
Next question?
Ya, try to get it to work with a TimeWarner Scientific Atlanta 8300HDC DVR. IT DOESN'T! Even though it is certified for the SA 8300 series.
You need to use this other WD drive for Scientific Atlanta 8300:
http://wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=334
Works also with TiVo HD and Serie3. That's what I have.
See the difference:
http://wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?Cat=10
You also need to make sure your cable provider has allowed you to connect an external drive to your DVR. Many Time Warner divisions, for example, have the eSATA port disabled in firmware.
I'm gonna have to say werd to that! I have SA 8300HDC and I can't get it to work properly either. the 8300HDC will recognize it and say that it has add it and that I know have a crapload more recording space available beut when I try to record a program it will say it's recording but it really isn't. When the show is over and you try to find it on the list of recorded show it's not there. So I've been unable to record a show for the last 5 months since I've gotten this thing.
There are a few differences between DVR tuned drives and regular drives.
The most important is that DVR drives don't retry on a bit error. This shows up a lot on playback (and less often on record), and makes sense for the application-- if you're working on a computer hard drive, you want the drive to retry if it misses a sector checksum, but for real time applications like video and voice, you don't want stutters and lags. Just display the wrong data and keep going, no real loss (a few pixels typically).
Another big difference is that the firmware on PVR-targeted drives is usually optimized for big, long sequential reads and writes. Traditional drives are more biased towards random-seek performance which is useless in a PVR application.
Generally speaking, that means that these drives benchmark pretty poorly when considered for desktop use and that traditional desktop drives don't do PVR work nearly as well as ones designed for that use.
The bitrates that DVR drives record at makes all that irrelevant. They are only recording 2-20 Mbps (megabits, not bytes), depending on the content (this is all encoded video). This is extremely slow, and makes access speeds irrelevant.
DVRs are using identical hard drives as the rest of the industry. The economics don't work out for them to be using "specially tuned drives". They're just using the slowest drives people make, since the speeds are largely irrelevant.
I don't agree. In a standard-def recorder, you're right, the bit rates are pretty low. My standard def tivos have all used off the shelf drives and been just fine.
In a high def tivo recorder, you're potentially recording 1080i, which is 1920 × 1080 or about 2.07 million pixels per frame, 25fps (so that's 32 Mb/s or so with color etc). Compressed, you'll drop that quite a bit, but 20Mb/s is probably a good upper bound as you say.
Now, record two of those streams at the same time, and play a third. You're now moving perhaps 50Mb/s, constantly, unending, from three different regions, which requires fast seeks, large block reads, and constant performance-- whereas a PC isn't going to have a problem copying a big ISO if a block gets delayed a bit for scheduleing, your video will suffer horribly if it is. And a constant 50Mb/s IS pushing the platter write speed on many drives.
Similarly, the thermal characteristics of a Tivo or other DVR are nowhere like that of even a poorly cooled computer case.
The bottom line is, it took about 2 weeks for my 7200rpm 500GB segate to start causing problems when i expanded my series 3, it caused stutters, dropouts, and crashes and reboots.
I've been using a WD my dvr expander for 3 months with no problems.
And here's weaknee's thoughts on the subject. I consider them the experts here.
http://www.weaknees.com/seagate-db35-hard-drives.php
Bottom line is, you'll often get ok performance with a standard drive, but you're definitely not guaranteed it.
It's too big. I wish this would connect to my Tivo.
http://olinari.com
Anyone else see Morse code in the pattern of thecooling vent holes? I can't quite seem to decode it, though...
you guys have the wrong picture that isn't a mydvr expander, that's a mybook. Very different and a my book will NOT work as a dvr expander so you should probably change the picture so there isn't any confusion to your readers.
my book drives work fine as a DVR expander.
i have the 1TB mybook drive plugged into a dish HD VIP622 DVR via USB, and it works like a charm.
So I'm confused.
If I buy this drive from DISH they'll waive the activation fee?
Or I buy it and still have to pay the actv. fee?
I usually get about 70 movies recorded on each external HD drive with most of them being MPEG4 and a few being in the old MPEG2 - that is well over 100 hours of HD on one of these drives. I have four external drives hooked up to two VIP-622's and you can now swap them as many times as you want within the same household.
DISH did drop ALL of the VOOM channels recently though...
Tasty!
I paid $200 CAD for a 1TB WD MyBook drive,admittedly a boxing day sale. But bare 500GB drives go for as low as $84 at the local shop (WD Caviar), so $150 really is a ripoff.
Do those drives have a case, power supply and necessary electronics to power the drive down to save precious data from the wear and tear of constantly spinning discs? Expensive? Maybe. Ripoff? Not that I can see.
hmm... All we need now is the DVR expanded for the Fios moto hd set top box......
The morse code translation can be found here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_My_Book