External drive for 8300HDC making me nervous

[DublinDoodah]

So I've added the external drive to my 8300HDC. Kudos to Scientific Atlanta for making it so easy. But now that I've got it running, I find that it makes me a little nervous. You see the blinking LED on the drive keeps reminding me that the drive is ALWAYS active; even if not actively recording or playing a program, it's buffering the current program. No problem, I'll just turn the DVR off when I'm not using it. Wrong, the LED keeps blinking ... all night! And when I get near the unit, you hear that it's not just spinning, the heads are moving. What the hell is it doing?

Now I'm not new to DVRs. I've had an Instant Replay since it first came out. When you turn that sucker off, it's disk spins down. Then it spins back up every half hour or so to check its recording schedule.

Here's what makes me nervous:

1) It seems intuitive that this constant I/O activity will shorten the life of the drive. And I know that when a drive filled with hours of programming goes bad, it can ruin your whole day.

2) It also seems very possible that if I turned it off (or the DVR lost power), its file system could be damaged.

It sure seems like there ought to be a way to put the disk into an inactive state so that it can be safely turned off and removed.

Anybody got enough experience with this thing to make me feel more comfortable with it?

[Scott]

This has always been my experience with DVRs. My D* HR10-250 (TiVo) spins constantly. I grown to ignore it, but it does make you nervous nevertheless.

[MeleeDave]

My only suggestion would be to buy a hard drive with a 5 year warranty. From what I've read, the drives that have the longer warranties are designed more for constant operation. As it turns out, I just had a 500 GB drive (1 year warranty) die in my media center PC. It was 10 months old. I don't think I'd buy a 1 year warranty drive ever again, since I leave my PC (and Tivo for that matter) on 24 hours a day.

[DublinDoodah]

I got a Seagate which has a 3 year warranty.

Actually, I think the Navigator software has a bug concerning the external drive. When you turn off the STB you still see I/O activity on the drive, expecially if tuned to an HD channel. Yesterday, I tried turning off the power to the drive and a message appeared on the screen telling me that I have to power off the STB and wait 10 seconds before disconnecting the drive. WTF, the power was already off! When I powered everything back on, it gave me another error message concerning the external drive, then made be reboot.

[nicholc2]

Thank goodness I still have passport on my 8300HD. I know it has the live DVR functionality bug when you connect an external drive, but at least the software is stable. When I finally get Navigator (hopefully later than sooner) that might be the final straw that makes me switch to directv. From everything I've read it's a complete piece of crap.

That being said, I also find that the hard drive works no matter if the DVR is turned on or off. The internal hard drive as well. I think that's because even if it's technically turned off, it's always working just in case something is scheduled to record and to receive updates from TW. Other than that minor annoyance with the live functionality it works great for me. I also have a Seagate because they at least have a good warranty. They just don't make drives like they used to.