http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/ Engadget Comments for WD's 500GB My DVR Expander drives certified for use with DISH HD DVRs http://www.engadget.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadget.com en-us Copyright 2012 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/May 16th 2008 2:31PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/
DVRs are being crippled every day so think twice about expanding your storage as you may not need it.]]>May 16th 2008 2:34PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/
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.]]>May 16th 2008 2:43PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/May 16th 2008 2:43PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/May 16th 2008 2:47PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/.<

I have 2 of the new ones, 4 of the old ones.]]>May 16th 2008 3:01PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/
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?
]]>May 16th 2008 2:53PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/]]>May 16th 2008 2:58PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/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]]>May 16th 2008 3:05PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/May 16th 2008 3:12PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/May 16th 2008 4:43PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/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).

]]>May 16th 2008 3:19PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/
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.]]>May 16th 2008 3:54PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/
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.]]>May 16th 2008 4:54PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/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.]]>May 16th 2008 5:20PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/
http://olinari.com]]>May 16th 2008 3:30PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/May 16th 2008 3:40PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/May 16th 2008 4:58PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/
i have the 1TB mybook drive plugged into a dish HD VIP622 DVR via USB, and it works like a charm.
]]>May 16th 2008 7:58PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/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?]]>May 16th 2008 4:52PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/
DISH did drop ALL of the VOOM channels recently though... ]]>May 17th 2008 1:54PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/May 17th 2008 1:21AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/May 17th 2008 2:30AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/May 17th 2008 3:47AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/May 17th 2008 6:19AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/wds-500gb-my-dvr-expander-drives-certified-for-use-with-dish-hd/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_My_Book]]>Jun 9th 2008 12:12AM