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External Hard Drive Discussions - See Facts Link in Post 1.

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#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
I'm new to this so please bear with me. I've tried searching with no success.

I just upgraded to a 9241 because my kids gave me an external hard drive for my BD.

Anyway, it formated just fine so here is my question.

As I keep recording movies etc, does the external drive become an overflow when the 9241 is full?? If this isn't the case, do I have to archieve shows to the external drive manually??

Once movies etc are in the hard drive do I just access them for watching the same as if they're on the 9241 drive.

I hope I explained properly but I'm sure somebody will let me know if not. :p

Here's the link to the eHDD facts thread. Read it to find the appropriate eHDD, etc.

Bell External Hard Drive Facts - Canadian TV, Computing and Home Theatre Forums

Do not ask questions in the Facts thread. Use this thread for questions.
 
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#139 ·
I have a 9242 with a 1 TB Verbatim drive that never sleeps, and my PVR menu comes up almost instantly. I also noticed that my external drive listing come up much faster since the upgrade, so I am assuming that they are loading the index for the external drive as soon as you press PVR. This is what is causing the delay when you press PVR with a drive that sleeps.
Bell does specify that the external drive must not have a sleep mode.
 
#140 ·
I don't have any delay with my drive. It's the western digital WD10EADS.


EDIT: I take that back. Now that I've got more than 8 hours of content on the drive, it's doing the same thing that it started doing with the other 9242 that I just returned. It shuts itself off after 5 minutes of viewing. It's as if it's choking on the flow of data.

Hmm I wonder if it's not the drive, but the external enclosure causing the issue. It seems strange it's the drive doing this. Although I only started having this trouble with the V184 firmware version. With V183 this drive worked flawlessly. The minute a few shows are saved to it that's it!
 
#152 ·
It is the Model 96571, I got it at Staples for 130.00. It is currently listed at 160, but it seems to go on sale for 130 each few weeks. Staples lists the warranty as being 3 years, but if you go to the Verbatim web site, they say all warranties are now 7 years.
I am very impressed with the drive. It is 7200 RPM, has a 32mb buffer, does not sleep and just works great. I have has my 9242 recording 2 HD programs to the internal drive, archiving programs to the Verbatim, and have watched a program from the Verbatim at the same time, with not a hint of stutter.
 
#142 ·
This morning plugged my EHD into my 9241 PVR. I copied all shows to the 9241. Then, I opened my EHD enclosure, removed the 1 Tb WD10EADS drive, installed a 250 Gb drive instead. I plugged that into the 9242 and formatted it. Then I plugged it into the 9241 and copied all shows to the 250 Gb EHD. It worked well. No problems so far. I pulled the USB out of the 9241 and into the 9242 and started copying the shows back to the 9242. I ended up with the exact same problem I had with the 1 Tb drive. It copies for a minute or two, and then the light goes off on the EHD enclosure and it disconnects from the 9242. So neither drive works. Hmmmm what could be causing this? I never had a problem until v184 and now v185. It may be:

- The 250 gb drive is a 7200 rpm. Yet it works with the 9241.
- It could be the EHD enclosure. It's made by NexStar and is called the NexStar CX.

Any ideas anyone?
 
#143 ·
Archiving no longer works...

I'm experiencing a strange problem where archiving no longer seems to work.

I've been using my external drive for several weeks now without issues. I've been able to successfully archive my recordings to it.

At the moment, the problem is, when I go to archive a recording, it'll display a progress indicator and time remaining. When I check the status a moment later, it's still proceeding. However, when I check it again, about 20 minutes later, it no longer shows any progress or time remaining, but apparently it's still archiving. When I check it still later, it does not report any archiving, and nothing gets copied to my external drive in the end. I tried this several times to no avail.

However, I can still access my external drive just fine, and play back previously archived recordings from it. And the drive isn't close to being full.

Anyone run into this issue or have any suggestions? My internal drive is full right now and not having the archiving function is not good...
 
#144 ·
I haven't had this trouble, my EHD will play about 5 minutes of a show and shuts itself down. This never happens with the 9241, only the 9242.

You may like to mention what PVR you are using. There is a world of difference between the different PVRs and how they behave with EHDs.
 
#145 ·
Not sure if you had considered this, but it seems that there are a lot of people on this board (or other boards) that warn EHD users about trying to fill up th EHD's to capacity. I use a Lacie 750 GB and I haven't had any issues with it since they first added the capability. I don't think I have ever had less than 10 hours of available space on it, though I did get a couple of automatic disconnects last week (but nothing regular). Also, I noticed that playing back from the EHD while having captions on will cause an automatic disconnect (I haven't reported that issue yet).

Don't know if any of these suggestions are helpful or not.
 
#147 ·
I pulled the USB out of the 9241 and into the 9242 and started copying the shows back to the 9242. I ended up with the exact same problem I had with the 1 Tb drive.
Have you considered that v185 created an EHD format incompatibility between the 9241 and 9242?

It could be the EHD enclosure. It's made by NexStar and is called the NexStar CX.
I have two on a 9242, each with WD10EADS drives, and have never had a problem. They've even recovered from stupid things like accidentally being turned off while files were being transferred. I've also filled one almost, but not completely, full and have never lost a program from drive corruption.
 
#148 ·
The 9241 wasn't even plugged into the wall until I started to have problems with the EHD. I hooked up the 9241 in order to access the EHD which was formatted by the 9242 and all recordings came from the 9242. The 9241 worked fine with the EHD. I decided to restore both SD recordings from the drive (using the 9241) and now it works fine with the 9242 again.

So it's either the 9242 doesn't like SD recordings saved on an EHD, or removing those recordings freed up space and now it's happy. I'm only going to place HD recordings onto the EHD to see if the problem comes back. If it doesn't then I'll know SD doesn't work well on the 9242 EHD.

I'm on my second machine that's doing the same thing. So perhaps you only save high def content. Or it the enclosure that's incompatible with the 9242.

What is the brand of your enclosure Scary?
 
#149 ·
I have two of the same Vantec CX enclosures and drives. There have been other reports of EHD problems with v185. That makes me think that *maybe* there is a file system incompatibility between older firmware versions and v185. I noticed that v185 triggered a file system check on the internal drive after the update. In theory, that should correct any issues. However, if the file system check was skipped (as it may have been on the EHD) or disk corruption was present, it could trigger incompatibility issues. In this case, switching the drive between the 9241 and the 9242 could have triggered those issues.
 
#151 ·
No no Scary. The 9241 was not being used. It was in my closet. These issues triggered me to dig it out to see if the 9241 could function with the drive - it passed with flying colors.

Yesterday I installed a 250 Gb drive into the enclosure. I wanted to determine if it was the WD10EADS. It's not. The 250 Gb drive is behaving exactly the same way. The 9242 formatted the 250 gb drive from scratch. Now that I've removed the SD recordings, I haven't had a problem. I copied a couple more HD shows - still ok.

It could be a new issue with SD and EHD. I had no issues until the v184 firmware came along.
 
#154 ·
I don't believe you can watch a show on your EHD if you are archiving something to it. You would be able to watch the internal HD though.

What case is your Verbatim drive in? I mean what brand is the case/enclosure?

EDIT: Nevermind, I just looked it up and see that it's an external USB HDD.
 
#159 ·
I have about 60 recordings on the external drive at this moment, with about 40 being HD, and the rest SD. and have not had one disconnect since I plugged the drive in just over a month ago. I was at V183 when I plugged the drive in, and have gone through the 184 & 185 upgrades without a hitch.
 
#156 ·
Hi guys

I posted earlier about my 9242 external hard drive issues. After no problems at all for months the drive started to disconnect after a few minutes of trying to watch any archived show. The drive was not even half full.
I tried the reformat suggestion (losing all my archived shows) but after transferring a few new shows to the reformatted drive I was still unable to watch them without a disconnection. Then I tried to restore them (move them back to internal drive) but I could not do this either without a disconnection error message.
I was hoping the issue was with my external hard drive so I bought a new Lacie 1TB drive and tried it, but it has the exact same problem. I have to conclude this is a problem with my receiver unless there are any other ideas out there.
Has anyone been able to figure out why some people have this issue and others don't?
 
#160 ·
I also have experienced the same issues of disconnects. I even went so far as to do the same as @natluc and reformatted the drive and reconnected it to my 9242.
Alas, last night I received all kinds of disconnects and any attempts to move content back to my 9242 caused disconnects. I was about to give up completely when I decided to delete a couple of SD episodes (Caprica) and low-and-behold everything is rocking and rolling like it should. I moved content back and forth between my Lacie 1TB and my 9242 without a single disconnect. I can only assume that there was some sort of corruption that occurred somewhere and my deletions 'fixed' it.
 
#161 ·
This kind of begs the question... Does anyone know how to force a file system check on the external drive? It can be done for the internal drive. It could be done on the external drive from Linux but we don't know if that would be compatible or if the drive would be usable with a Bell PVR after.

It could be a new issue with SD and EHD. I had no issues until the v184 firmware came along.
It certainly looks like that is the case. I typically don't archive SD shows, which could explain why I have seen no issues.
 
#162 ·
My EHD was working great until I archived the movie "Slap Shot (1977)" which of course was in standard def. Once I deleted it from the EHD the drive began working ok again.

The method I used to delete it from the drive was to plug the drive into my 9241 and move it to the 9241. It worked without a glitch. Yet when I tried to restore it to the machine it was recorded on - the 9242 - the EHD would turn off after 3 minutes into the transfer. Now that the show is gone, all is well again.

This is either because the 9242 doesn't like SD content on the EHD, or the space freed up enabled the EHD to work again, or maybe there was some corruption in the movie causing this. The strange thing is NO recordings would play without the EHD shutting down after a couple of minutes. Now everything is ok again.

For others having problems, keep an eye on SD content that you've saved.
 
#164 ·
Hi Fellas,

Last night I joined the club of people having problems with their EHD. I have a 1 TB WD (not sure of model, I bought it at Costco). I will go home to night to check software versions etc.

My machine is letting me watch movies from the EHD but if I pause the show it will not start again.

I can not delete any movies on the EHD. The reciever trys to but it fails. When I try to restore a movie to the PVR it does it but the original is still left on the EHD.

My receiver is a 9241.

My EHD is relatively full, over 60 hrs of HD movies. Why do we think that filling a EHD over 75% is a problem?
 
#165 ·
I read the posts about the SD content possibly causing problems with the EHD so I deleted the SD content from my EHD but still had the same disconnect problem. I then reformatted the EHD and transferred one single HD show to the EHD. When I tried to watch it it disconnected after about 2 min.
I can't understand why this is happening after so many months of trouble free operation.
Does anyone have any insight as to a possible fix for this issue coming from Bell?
 
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