Does it use 3.5 or 2.5" HD? Any guide like ifixit.com for the PVR? Only Esata? Or USB as well?

 

I think pretty much any 3.5" sata drive should work.

There is lots of useful info about replacing the drive in this old thread:

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=40947

 

Please note. This thread is strictly for the discussion of upgrading your internal drive on a Shaw PVR with firmware 16.74.

Please read the links in Post #1 before posting here.

 

What power connector is used on the drive? Old molex style, or new sata style?

I looked through the old thread, but couldn't find any info.

 

OK, the only drive I had here is a 250Gb. I put it in, how can I tell if it is being recognized as a 250?

EDIT!

Woohoo,
went into diagnostic mode, checked DVR status, it said
30 991 712 256 B for recording capacity remaining.

Converted, that is 230.90625 gigabits I think. Is that right?

Went to the next page, said installed drive was 250GB

So I think the limit is gone! Wonder what the top is.

 

The Fuzz. Does everything work properly? Guide, Recording, Playback etc? Did your space left % drop down on your list when you went from 160 to 250?

Edit: What are the specs on the 250gb drive you used?

 

Haven't had much time to confirm that, but recording and live rewind etc worked. Used space is 0%, since it is a new drive. Guide worked. Drive is a Western Digital Caviar, can't see the full specs but it is older, probably 4 years old.

 

I just put in a 1TB WD Green drive and so far ... so good. Booted up fine. Pause function works.

Have a recording set to begin in 20 minutes to test. However, I am also reporting the same free space in my diagnostics screen (30991712256) which actually only converts to 28GB (TheFuzz ... I think you ran the calculation for gigabits, not gigabytes). I'm not yet worried about that as it may have something to do with all the initialization that needs to go on. Will check it later.

 

I haven't opened my boxes but I am guessing the 3416 boxes use SATA drives and the older 6416 use IDE or PATA?
Can any one confirm that?
If the good reports keep coming in I am going to put in a larger drive me self on both boxes.

 

3416, 6412PIII, and 6416 all use SATA.

Still can't get proper capacity. The Diagnostics reports a 1000GB drive, but I am not getting even the old 160GB free space. I just pulled the drive and re-formatted it as NTFS in my PC to force the DCT to re-format it. We'll see if that solves the problem.

 

You are right, I have 1 thing recorded now, and it is using 23% space.

My drive was NTFS formatted before I put it in. grrrr

 

Argh that sucks, id help trouble shoot but I dont have any extra drives laying around.
1 program shouldn't take up 23%. Something must be off, have you done the format through the moto box?

 

How do I do that? I'll give it a try.

 

This is from the Cogeco section but should be the same since its both moto boxes

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showpost.php?p=569650&postcount=1
Its like entering cheat codes on Nintendo haha

 

I pulled the drive ... re-formatted it as exFAT and tried again. Same problem. I did a recording test as well and it pro-rated to a total of about 5 hours of recording so there's clearly an issue.

Also tried the hard drive reset to no avail.

I've popped back in my 160GB drive for now.

 

Yay, cheat codes! Alright, reset. waiting now . . .


EDIT
So does this mean we have to wait another 2 years for another firmware update???

 

TheFuzz ... if that doesn't work, the only thing I didn't try was a full system reset. It's detailed here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_to_use_a_Motorola_DVR/Resets ...

You might want to try it, but note the risks involved (I take no responsibility for your ambitions!).

 

Well, formatting brought up the same free space, so that didn't work. I just put the old drive back in for now, so won't be doing a full reset.

I guess the next thing to try is esata . . .but that will be for another night.

 

I guess the next thing to try is esata . . .but that will be for another night.

eSata is clearly the way to go in my book, even if internal was recognized fully. eSata is supposed to be hot-pluggable in the Moto, so it should be possible to easily swap a couple external drives back and forth. Why void the warranty with an internal? All I can think of is to get more space all at once (1 upgraded internal and 1 external), or that the warranty is already expired. Have I overlooked something? Thanks.

 

Sigh, to bad things cant be simple.
Hopefuly we can figure out how to do a drive swap or do the external thing some how. Or we will keep wishing for that next update

 

I think the external drive solution is only a day or two away and that issue should be followed in this thread.

I might try the full system reset to see if that fixes the internal drive option ... but probably won't get to it for a couple of days.

 

Interesting that the drives are no longer appearing as capped 160GB drives. Looks like something has changed.

 

Something has definitely changed in how the DCT handles hard drives. Just can't figure why it doesn't utilize at least 160GB. If that was happening, I would assume that the reports are wrong and internal capacity is still limited to 160GB. In this case, there is obviously something else going on and wish I could figure it out.

 

Maybe having the esata port enabled causes the DCT to look at the internal drive differently.

On a different topic, I spoke to Shaw, and the CSR and his supervisor knew nothing about adding internal or external drives to the Motorola DCT's. They mentioned that the Pace PVR's had the EHD capability, but the Motorolas had neither. I hope they were just misinformed.

 

Ya, I'm curious as to what happened to hard drives that were larger than 160Gb installed before the update. Are they still limited to 160, or did they drop down to the 30ish Gb I was getting? Maybe the formatting code is just messed up.

 

They were being capped by firmware as suggested in this thread: http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=40947

 

I understand that, but AFTER the firmware upgrade, has anything changed?