Married Hard Drives
Yes, those who have recently mentioned that hard drive recordings are not copy-able or transferable to any other device are absolutely correct. Once an external drive is connected to the PVR, it maps (or marries) that drive to that receiver. And if the external drive is larger than the internal one, all recordings will go to the external drive and only revert back to the internal one once the available space on it exceeds the external drive.
If say you add external drive 'A' to your PVR and fill it up, and you want to keep those recordings after you've now added external drive 'B', you can't salvage anything on 'A'. The minute you attach 'B', it marries it to the PVR and essentially divorces 'A'. If you did attempt to reattach 'A', it immediately re-formats it wiping out anything you had on it and by doing so, you've now rendered 'B' useless also from a viewing anything you had on it perspective.
This is why for me I refuse to accept SD's haste in offering to replace my PVR when problems occur. Not only do I lose everything on the hard drive but now I have to settle for a non-new supposedly refurbed PVR.
I submitted a request to SD that they at least make external hard drives swappable so that once 'B' is introduced, 'A' would still be viewable but every rep I dealt with during my dialogue pulled out the classic 'it would violate copyright infringement laws', reminding me of just how many government agencies hide behind the privacy law even when the info in question is in the public domain, but I digress.
No matter how hard they tried to explain, I fail to see how this would be a violation. If the so called copyrighted info on the external drive (or internal for that matter) cannot be copied, how would using external drives to archive recordings (or re-attach to a replacement PVR) violate any laws? Yes, I suppose I could loan my drive to another 630 owner but so what, they could have just as easily recorded the same material but didn't.
I suppose my mistake is in regarding the hard drives relating to the 630 in the same way as a DVD recorder, VCR, Casette Recorder, Memory Stick, PC external drive and anything similar. All of these and more can hold copyrighted material but more importantly, all be copied from which arguably may be a violation, but as long as material on PVR 630 drives cannot be copied, why do they need to be erased the minute you try and reconnect 'A' after the presence of 'B' or to a new receiver?
Because I initially viewed the external drive as something to keep valuable recordings on, I now have a few years worth of material that I'd like to preserve since it will never be available again. Since I can no longer consider this material as anything other than temporary, I would be interested in hearing from those who use a DVD recorder or any other device to save recordings from their 630's hard drives and exactly how such devices are connected.
Thanks.
PS. One other thing, one of the better tech reps I dealt with on a host of recent issues pointed out you need to ensure your external hard drive isn't disconnected during a PVR flush, otherwise when you reconnect it the receiver will not recognize it and will simply do its usual reformatting, goodbye recordings!