I am glad that you were able to pick one up, aparsons, and best of luck with the install. Be sure to post to this forum if you have any problems.

When you install it does it overwrite the existing recordings? i.e. you lose them?

No, the existing programming remains on the internal drive, and the external drive simply adds to the available storage space.

Thanks! I found 2 "My Book AV" units at the Best Buy by Surrey Centre Mall on King George Blvd. Left the DCX-3400 on, connected the My Book to it by the provided eSATA cable, turned on the power to the My Book, and saw the screen message re formatting. Less than 15 seconds later it was done and functioning as a drive. All my existing recordings were still accessible. Couldn't have been simpler.

Well i decided since i had 2 500 GB 3.5" HDD i was not using i would put one of them in an external enclosure and see how it worked with an Esata connection to my rented Motorola 3400-m. The first drive did not like the DVR so i connected the second drive. It worked great and asked to format drive. So i let it. Voila an extra 500GB of storage added.

After this little hiccup with the first drive i decided to do some testing. I realized after testing both drives about ten times each that you have to have both drives with a valid partition and formatted for the DVR to recognize them. You also need to leave DVR on before turning on external Esata unit.

I later through extensive testing of an addition 3 drives determined that i could get just about any 500GB drive to work if it was prepared properly.

I.E. i had to partition and format in a specific way. The way i made it work was only one partition marked active and formatted as ntfs. i then plugged drive into DVR while off. Then i turned DVR on and waited for tv to show a channel. Only then did i turn on power to Esata unit. It would then ask me to format drive.

Sometimes it would through errors like DVR would power cycle. This indicated that the drive was not functioning properly. I found that you must maintain power to drive when DVR is turned off. This had caused me all sorts of headaches.

I found a fix though. If your drive works initially but then fails to function or DVR power cycles when its connected you have to repartition and reformat the drive. I believe disconnecting power to the drive while DVR is off causes errors that drive cannot handle and results in corruption of the data.

My conclusions are if you want to do this have several drives of different manufacture and be prepared to keep drive on permanently. I also think its a good idea to make sure drive is freshly formatted in ntfs format and be of only one partition. Oh and if it does not work out of the gate check to make sure its not corrupted. I had it corrupted 2 times by turning it off to save power while DVR was off and finally realized it was not a good idea to turn it off. So to all those that are having issues i hope this helps.

I would not recommend buying and expensive external drive if you are comfortable with pc's. It is cheapest i think to buy an external esata enclosure for $20.00 dollars and use a $50 internal drive that you already have. I know not everyone is comfortable with this or has a few drives laying around that they can do this with. But i will say if you do you can save yourself some money by using existing hardware or maybe just having to buy an cheap external esata enclosure.

Could someone plug their used dvr expander drive into their computer and list the actual files on there? If it shows as unformatted, boot into linux and it should read the partition.

You can use http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ to put linux on a spare USB stick.

I see there's been a lot of discussion on this issue over the last few years, but nothing recent. I have the Motorola DCX3400 DVR from Eastlink. I've recently tried to add an external eSATA hard disk to expand recording capacity and have had mixed results. The DVR sees the external disk and did the initial format. However, when I try to use the DVR it behaves erratically and eventually hangs. When I'm watching live TV there are numerous pauses, sometimes lasting for minutes. When I'm playing back a recorded show it behaves the same way. Even getting a show to record completely is no guarantee.

I initially tried using a WD Mybook but didn't have any luck. I decided to check on the specs of the internal SATA disk and found that it was only 5400 rpm. I replaced it with a 7200 rpm Seagate with 64 MB cache. I'm tempted to locate a WD branded disk but I'm not very confident that will fix the problem.

Has anyone gotten an external disk to work with the DCX3400, and if so, what brand of disk did you use?

Thanks!

There are several versions of "MyBook". If I recall correctly, one of these goes to sleep and is incompatible with a eHDD application since the eHDD needs to run 24/7. So, you need to get a MyBook designed for use with a PVR, or you can "make your own" using say a WD Black drive and an appropriate enclosure like the Vantec or Thermaltake. Sometimes the drives need to be configured using a computer first to ensure they don't sleep and there's software for the drive to do this, although most (bare) drives do not require that step.

You may wish to have a look at the Shaw forum here where they have similar discussions and they also use Motorola STBs.

I didn't realize MyBook's had a sleep function. Not sure if mine does or not. I had actually planned on getting a new external disk, but when I checked at our local Staples they didn't have anything with eSATA, just USB2/3. Seems to be less common now. Instead I bought a new MyBook for my PC and used the old MyBook with eSATA on the DVR. As I mentioned I had the replace the original disk as well, but it's possible that the 1TB Seagate disk I got is the issue. I'm going to play with a couple of smaller 300GB disks not being used and see what kind of results I get.

Thanks for the info!

old MyBook with eSATA on the DVRMost of the new MyBooks say "AV" or "DVR" or "PVR" or similar on them indicating they are designed for this purpose. If you've got an older MyBook for a PC (and not PVR), it's likely it goes to sleep. You may still be able to use it for this application if you download the software and configure the drive not to sleep on your computer first.