Will this drive work as an expander?

[#1]

Hello.  I have an old hard drive that I used as an expander for my previous Shaw PVR, probably 10 years old. I moved it to my DCX3510-M when I got it about a year and a half ago, formatted it, and used it, but a lot of shows are being recorded with errors now: the picture will freeze for a second and come back with massive pixelation and do a Max Headroom stuttering. This seems to happen a lot.  I know the feed is fine.  So I suspect the drive has had it.

I looked for guidance on a replacement (because this drive came from Shaw), but didn't find it.  On my own I came up with this:

Amazon.com: Fantom Drives 4TB External Hard Drive - USB 3.0/3.1 Gen 1 + eSATA Aluminum Case - Mac, W... 

Does that look like it would work?  When I swap drives and format the new one, will it still see shows that I assume are recorded on the internal drive?  I don't know how to tell which shows are recorded on which disk. I hope we won't lose everything just because they don't know how to do indexing in multiple locations.

[shaw-tony]

Hey pjscott,

Thank you for reaching out! Unfortunately, 3rd party expanders are out of our scope of support. It may cause issues or errors. The only expanders our equipment supports are located here. Let me know if you have any other questions! 

Cheers,

Tony | Community Mod.

[#3]

Thank you.  As I said, I already have one of those expanders, but it's ancient and flaky. So how do I go about ordering a new one?

[shaw-tony]

You are welcome! At this time, we do not offer expanders anymore. However, any eSATA drive that are "PVR certified" should work but it is not guaranteed.

Hope that helps,

Tony | Community Mod.

[#5]

Personally, I wouldn't use that drive without finding out what the actual hard drive model is inside.

Are you at all 'handy'?  Find a Purple 2TB drive (Purple are for AV and/or Surveillance, which is the workload you will be doing with it), open your expander and swap the drive inside.

Otherwise look for a Purple drive and a new case/shell, put them together (some stores will if asked), and use that.

[#6]

I have the Iomega, which inside I find is a little eSATA card with what looks like a standard Seagate internal drive plugged into it. There's a Purple with the same form factor as the Seagate?

[#7]

Yes.

All 3.5" SATA hard drives have the same form factor.  Screw hole placement and sizes too.

Any of the Purple 3.5" drives will work.

FYI, if you care, that isn't a standard Seagate drive, that is a AV/Surveillance drive too. 

Your other question, if it will see the programs recorded on the internal drive, yes, they will still be there too.  Something else interesting, on the older Motorola PVRs, the list would still show the programs on the removed drive.  If you tried to play them, it would say Insert/Connect Drive 1.  If you wiped/lost the internal drive, then everything was gone.

The Arris branded PVRs, including the Gateway, the information was stored on the drive, so they would disappear from the list, showing up again when the drive was reconnected.

I have no idea how the DCX3510 will work, but the programs on the internal drive will still be there.

You may also want to try without the Expander for a week, see if the issues continue, it might be that the internal drive is messing up.

[#8]

I plugged the Purple 2TB into the Iomega case and there was no format prompt when it came up, nor was there any extra capacity.  I went into the diagnostics on the DCX3510 and it sees the drive, but says its capacity is 0 bytes and it is not DVR capable. Now what?

[#9]

Connect it to a computer to partition and format the drive, then connect it back to the PVR, it should then prompt to format..

Sometimes they don't 'like' a drive to actually be blank (which brand new drives are).

[cdx304]

I would say plug it inti the esata and find out .i build my own 8TB and i used a purple drive has to be a hard drive designed for 24/7 usage