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External Hard Drive.

For those of you who have an external hard drive hooked up do you have to leave the STB on all the time for it to stay "connected" to your hard drive? I ask because when I hooked up my Fantom 1TB drive everything worked perfect but I noticed later on that day after shutting off the STB earlier that the hard drive was no longer recognized. The hard drive was on but not spinning or I guess active. I turned the hard drive off then back on again and everything worked properly so that night I left the STB on and the next morning everything was still working as it should. Just trying to find out if the box needs to be on all the time because I'm using a Fantom brand or if I was using the Verizon recommended WD hard drives or other brand drives I'd need to do the same thing. Thanks - Dave

Comments

jmw1950

I suspect there is some sort inactivity timeout on the external hdd that you need to disable so that it doesn't spin down. My guess is the STB goes to look at the external HDD after it spins down gets a non-ready type status, and that's it for the external HDD as far as the STB is concerned.

Turning off the STB does very litte. It mutes the audio, puts the time of day on the display, and changes the video output to the screen saver. That is about all it does.

There is no detectable difference in power consumption between the STB being on and being off. So I'd be very surprised if turning off the STB was the cause of the problem.

Keyboards

I have had an external 1TB WD MyBook drive operating now for over a year and have never had an issue with the external drive unmounting (regardless if the DVR is "on" or "off"). As has been stated, there really is no off for a DVR as it is still buffering both tuners or recording something scheduled. As has been suggested, may be something in that particular drive that is giving a not ready signal back to the DVR, but I still fail to establish a correlation as to whether the DVR is on or off.

dave350x

Thanks for the responses. I do understand fully in regards to the whole DVR on/off thing. May just be the Fanton drive is not really designed for this purpose. I did contact Fanton support with some questions but they really weren't able to offer too much advice except that their drives are designed to be used with computers and because of this can't really say that it will or will not work as a DVR Expander with Fios. What I've done is connected everything again this morning, and left the DVR box "on" just for the heck of it. The next recording is scheduled for later in the afternoon so I figured experiment and see what happens. If it works I'll continue for a day or two and give an update.

whirl

Please keep us updated. I have a similar green drive, and it causes my stb to reboot, so when I check it the next day, it already rebooted, but the drive isn't connected.

If you catch it rebooting, perhaps that's the cause, not the hd spinning down. I wouldnt' have known unless I caught it rebooting.

dave350x

I never caught my STB rebooting but it may have. My experience with the Greendrive is the following.

Hooked it up and initially everything worked perfectly with no issues and the light on the front of the GreenDrive was lite brightly. Shut my TV and STB off and left for the day. Later that day the drive was disconnected and the light was now dimmly lit. I shut the drive off and then on and once again everything worked perfectly. I left my STB "on" all night and when I checked it the next morning everything was still working correctly. So now I thought maybe the box needs to be "on" but as others have mentioned and they are correct, this makes no difference. So now I go to work, with the box still "on", came home and it was disconnected again. Now the only recording scheduled that day was at 4pm. It actually started to record it but only 6 mins of it then nothing more and I now that I think about it may have done this the fist time around as well. So what may have happened is the drive had been connected all day long and for some reason it started to record and then the STB rebooted? Do you notice the same recording issue, just a few mins then nothing more? If the set top box is rebooting and you can determine what causing it that may just solve the problem? Regardless, I returned the drive and will either upgrade to the new 500GB Verizon box or wait for WD to start again producing the hard drive (if they plan on it that is) that Verizon supports for this. I have yet to read someplace that someone has wrote....."This is the brand and model drive you can currently purchase besides the WD version and it works perfectly for this application".

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