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Project Insomnia

Project Insomnia is many things, but in this context it is simply a "braindump" of whatever I happen to be thinking/reading/watching/doing at the moment. Parental guidance suggested.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Olympic-size DVR storage - an update

Following up on this post from earlier this month, about the trials and tribulations in adding external storage to my DirecTV HD-DVR. I've returned the Buffalo DriveStation unit back to Fry's. We used it with moderate success to buffer two weeks of Olympic events, but the DVR was markedly less stable and there were noticeable gray-screen delays when deleting saved programs or browsing the list. That, combined with DirecTV's lack of support for the eSATA port and anything their customers might want to attach to it, made the decision to return it a pretty easy one.

What would DirecTV have to change in order for me to use external storage on the DVR?
  1. Supporting the port in hardware, by which I mean acknowledging its existence; recommending specific drives and performing compatibility testing.
  2. Supporting it in software, by which I mean not having to reboot the DVR to use external storage; using external storage as additional space for the internal drive and not, as is presently the case, an either-or situation that doesn't transfer saved programs or Prioritizer entres.

For now, I'll stick with the internal drive. The Olympics were really the only situation, aside from our recent three-week vacation, in which we risked running out of space on the internal drive, so I don't anticipate needing more any time soon. If I do, and DirecTV still isn't supporting eSATA, I'll probably investigate an internal upgrade.

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|| Andrew, 12:08 PM || ||

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