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Shaw Gateway: Adding External Drives

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#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
Edit by 57. See the following post for instructions:

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?p=2043129#post2043129



Just wanted to post an update around external enclosures and capacities:

Thanks to some help from deaenforcement I now have my Vantec enclosure working with a 3TB drive. Wahoo - tons of recording space now!

The drive I used is a Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 from Memory Express, and the Vantec is a standard low-end eSata (+Firewire / USB2) enclosure. Just for others looking to hook this up:

Step 1: Get the code added to your account
Step 2: Get the code actually pushed out to your Arris Gateway.

The latter is the more challenging one, it was hard to find a TSR who knew what I meant, I ended up pinging @Shaw_Alex on twitter who did some hunting around for me and got it done - but even that took about a day or so.

After that a gateway reboot and then entering the external hard drive menu item in settings. Formatting took about the full 30 minutes due to the size of the drive I'm assuming.

One item of note - I accidentally formatted a 1TB drive and had that running for a few days before I did the math and realized I mixed it up with my 3TB enclosure of the same type. When I switched them I assumed I'd lose some recordings but actually didn't. I speculate this to mean the unit may fill up the internal drive before the external, but that's just speculation.

Thanks again to deaenforcement for the help!
 
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#2 ·
Just a quick question for you, mattryyc: Did you actually play any of the recordings you had from when the 1TB drive was connected or did they just show up in the listings? If you are able to play all of them then that is really exciting.
 
#4 ·
That's great as I can probably swap out my 1TB for a larger one eventually too and not have to worry about needing to plug it back in if I don't record too much before then.
 
#5 ·
External Drive for Gateway

for those looking for success stories, the following setup has been functioning for 1 day without incident

1x Mediasonic HUR1-SU3S2 RAID enclosure
2x WD20EARS (Western Digital Barracuda Green 2TB)

when configured for single, only the first drive was usable. this means that the gateway doesn't support/include an esata port multiplier (according to the enclosure docs)

when configured for RAID0 spanning, the full 4TB became usable

before: 98% used (internal drive)
after: 6% used (internal + external enclosure)

total formatting time was about 10 minutes

the Mediasonic website states that the device supports 2x 3TB drives.
 
#27 ·
for those looking for success stories, the following setup has been functioning for 1 day without incident

1x Mediasonic HUR1-SU3S2 RAID enclosure
2x WD20EARS (Western Digital Barracuda Green 2TB)

when configured for single, only the first drive was usable. this means that the gateway doesn't support/include an esata port multiplier (according to the enclosure docs)

when configured for RAID0 spanning, the full 4TB became usable

before: 98% used (internal drive)
after: 6% used (internal + external enclosure)

total formatting time was about 10 minutes

the Mediasonic website states that the device supports 2x 3TB drives.
*** WARNING *** I can confirm the Mediasonic HUR1-SU3S2 supports 3TB drives but Shaw Gateway does not. Despite that, this is still a success story. To see 3TB you must create GPT partitions which I did at the start. Unfortunately GPT is only recognized by 64bit systems. The Shaw Gateway would not recognize the drive as GPT. I erased the GPT partition and restored with MBR which only supports up to 2TB. This time the Gateway recognized the drive and formatted in about 10mins. I checked the Recording Space and all is very well (other than losing 1TB of my 3TB drive).

My gear:
1x Mediasonic HUR1-SU3S2 RAID enclosure in RAID 1 mode
2x Hitachi Deskstar 0S03208 3TB SATA3 7200RPM

Notes:
- Do not use drives greater than 2TB for Shaw Gateway expander unless you are happy with a big chunk of inaccessible drive space.
-- After reading this forum I decided not to use green drives for this application.
- To enable RAID toss away the CD with the instruction manual and download revC of the manual with the corrected procedure at http://support.mediasonicinc.com/HUR1-SU3S2/hur1-su3s2_manual_revc.pdf
-- basically you must press and hold the RAID switch inside the case BEFORE you power on, not after you power on
-- RAID is set up in the enclosure before partition and format in Windows
--- RAID 1 (mirrored drives) shows up as a single 2TB drive in Windows for 2 x 2TB drives configured as RAID 1
- Shaw Gateway eSATA port was enabled out of the box
- For me powering down the Shaw Gateway is a pain because the Portal has to be rebooted after as well.
-- After a couple cycles of this I just plugged in the drive without first powering down the Gateway.
--- The Gateway recognized the disk and displayed the format menu while I was watching the Seahawks vs Vikings, Vikings won, damn! After navigating the menu, Format --> Yes, Are you sure --> Yes. The formatting went on in the background while I continued to watch the game.
--- It is always good practice to power down before plugging into external ports, so at your own risk
- That's it, that's all, pretty easy huh!!!
 
#6 ·
correction.

I've returned the 2x WD20EARS (Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB) drives. They're unsuitable to this application.

Best I can determine, once I deleted the files that were on the eSATA drive, the WD drives spun down and went to sleep. At that point the Gateway would have to be bounced to get the drives back online.
 
#8 ·
I would have to agree with JasonB on this one. w.smith your enclosure most likely has a sleep mode enabled. Disable that and see what your experience is.

The difference between a DVR external drive is that it doesn't go to sleep, so any self made external drives must comply with the same requirements.
 
#9 ·
I'm not so sure it might not have been the drives... many people have had issues with the green models in many different implementations. But, of course, the enclosure cannot be ruled out.

I came to this thread as I am getting the Gateway next weekend and I wanted to prepare an external drive. I already have a Vantec enclosure hooked up to the Wii that I will use and then replace the next time they are on sale. I'm wondering, however, what drive is the most cost efficient while still being completely functional? In this post it is mentioned that the limiting factor for the Gateway with regards to how many actions can happen at once is the hard drive speed; which makes sense to me. So while I like the price of the Green drives, I am worried that even without any sleep mode issues, will this slower drive by fast enough for the Gateway?
 
#10 ·
@Flash604 - I have had similar problems with the WD Green drives. They were the drives inside the 1TB My Book series. Even with the ESata output, they constantly went to sleep in a raid array, which caused all sorts of problems. When I spoke with WD, they confirmed they are not the right drive for something that needs to keep alive. You cannot disable the sleep mode on the drives from what I have been told, so returning them was probably the best choice. Transfer rate shouldn't have been a problem, but they are not very fast drives....

With regard to swapping out a drive, you should be able to swap out multiple drives as long as they are all associated with the Gateway. If one fills up or gets near to full and you want to store more, you should be able to just connect another one and put the old one back when you want to watch the shows you have stored. My understanding is that it's all about the handshake with a particular unit, but the gateway, or any of the pvr's should be ok with more than one drive. I haven't tried it myself, but if memory serves me correctly others have done it successfully.
 
#11 ·
I'd be interested in others experiences with external drives on the gateway. I purchased the same enclosure as W. Smith indicated above (MediaSonic HUR1-SU3S2), but installed two Hitachi 3 TB drives (7200rpm) with RAID-0 and spanning.

The format took an hour +, but everything seemed to come up fine and I've been recording and watching lots of shows over the past 10 days.

I have had two times where my external drive "disappeared". There were no messages from the Gateway or Portal. You only realize it is missing when you see the recording space used jump from 5% to 50% and a bunch of the shows disappear.

In order to fix it I've had to reboot the Gateway with the enclosure powered off. When the portals are back up, I power on the drive enclosure and it reappears with all recordings in place.

If anyone else can share their experiences, I'd potentially be interested in moving to an alternate, more stable solution before I get this thing packed with recordings.

As mentioned by a previous poster, "sleep modes" need to be avoided. The only reference I see with respect to that for my enclosure is if I synch the power on to the host. I have that feature disabled.
 
#32 ·
I'm glad to see the thread is active again.

Amosnov's post has me thinking. I have the same Hitachi 3 TB drives and MediaSonic enclosure. The gateway represents free space as a % vs raw capacity, so I wasn't sure what the system was seeing from my 2x 3 TB drives. I did a quick calculation at the time and felt I have getting about 5.5TB from my two drives.

I did not attach them to any PC before I connected them to the Gateway. The format took an hour or more.

Next time I disconnect it, I'll have to confirm what capacity I am getting in case I did it wrong previously.

I'm hoping Amosnov can weigh in on my bigger problem. Once or twice per week, my external disk disappears without warning or message. The shows on it disappear from the recording list and my recordings all go to the internal drive (which reached 100% pretty quickly right now).

The only fix I've found is to power down the gateway and hard drive, reboot the gateway, then when it is fully booted, restart the hard drive. Everything comes back without incident, but this is getting to be a real pain. If I don't check it every couple of days, I'm worried that it will auto-disconnect, my internal drive will fill up, and I will miss recordings.

Any similar experiences with other drives would be very useful to know about.

Thanks.
 
#12 ·
Will programs on External Drive still be available if Arris box is replaced?

I'm about to switch to Shaw Gateway from Star Choice (Shaw Direct). One of the continual problems I had with the Shaw Direct HDPVR was having to return it to the factory for service/replacement. I would take the Hard drive out and reinstall it in the new box, but I was forced to reformat the drive before I could use it on the new box. Thus, the service to the HDPVR would kill my saved programs.

I'd like to use an external eSata box with my Shaw Gateway system (I'm thinking of an Otherworld (MacSales) Raid 1 (mirror) box in which I can put a couple of 3 TB drives. This system would likely outlast the Gateway box because of the reliability of the mirror.

But, if the Gateway box fails, and I have to get it replaced under warranty, would I be forced to reformat the external eSata box? Does anybody know what will happen?
 
#15 · (Edited)
Q re external storage

Does anyone know how external is used?

I.e. Does it use internal and then external expander as needed?

I believe on my early Moto the expander 'replaced' the internal and when expander failed everything was gone.

Reason for asking is that I just had a message that expander was removed without first un-mounting it and that anything saved would be lost.

I did accidentally disconnect the eSata instead of power plug yesterday, but that was yesterday :)

Looking at myPVR it all seems to be there but I have not tried to play anything yet.

Perhaps I should unmount and power cycle the external?

EDIT:
Well, I found out what caused it to go offline today :)
A disk in the Lacie puked and since it's RAID0 the external is down.

With reference to my question of how external is used, it would seem internal first as I am able to play what I recorded yesterday. Would be nice to get confirmation though. I now have a red light showing on the Gateway, far right. Not message, anyone know?
 
#18 ·
Hard Drive for External

Going to give this a try as it is meant for 24/7 DVR use,

Western Digital AV-GP 2TB 64MB 3.5" SATA Internal Hard Drive

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=150

Will try in a couple of Esata enclosures I have and see if it will work.

Unless I heard him wrong, Shaw Tech Support guy mentioned they are testing 3TB expanders so there will be an official unit sometime.
 
#19 ·
What is the easiest way you can determine that the external drive has been recognized and is being used for recording space?

I have my new Gateway system up and running and after attaching the external drive the message to format the drive came up and now there is an icon in the Gateway menu "External Drive" but it doesn't say 2TB or anything to do with the size of it.

Thanks,

Jeremy
 
#20 ·
You can check the 'Options' window on the 'PVR' list and compare the percentage values with the external drive both connected and disconnected. I don't know any easier way than this at the moment.
 
#22 ·
WD Green Drives

I have been using 2 1TB green drives in a BlacX dual esata unit connected to my current DCT6412 III with no sleep effects earlier mentioned. The drives have functioned without issue since the esata port was enabled by Shaw? I am on the list for the Gateway (Chilliwack), but haven't heard from a Shaw CSR yet. I have a couple of new 2TB drives I will try with the BlacX on the Gateway when it is installed.
 
#24 ·
I have been using 2 1TB green drives in a BlacX dual esata unit connected to my current DCT6412 III with no sleep effects earlier mentioned. The drives have functioned without issue since the esata port was enabled by Shaw? I am on the list for the Gateway (Chilliwack), but haven't heard from a Shaw CSR yet. I have a couple of new 2TB drives I will try with the BlacX on the Gateway when it is installed.
Did you actually see 2TB with the "BlacX dual esata"?

I didn't think that the Motorola DCT6412's (and others) couldn't see more than 1TB???
 
#23 ·
I have had the following running for 24 hours,

Western Digital AV-GP 2TB 64MB 3.5" SATA Internal Hard Drive
NexStar CX External 3.5" - eSata and USB2.0

I would have gotten a 3TB but didn't find a source in Canada to order from.

Ran it through it's paces last night with 6 tuners recording HD at the same time and also tested removing and putting back and all recordings play back fine. Nanaimo seems pretty stable with the Gateways as VOD working fine and the stop playback on one portal and resume from another is working fine as well. Seems to run pretty cool as well.

I did the math on the recording size used with the extender on and off and definitely using the 2TB on top of the 500GB.

 
#25 · (Edited)
The BlacX can switch between drives, I just push a button and the second drive connects, the moto box goes black for a few seconds then a blue screen announces either drive 1 or drive 2 is connected with an OK. I click confirmation and low and behold all the recorded items are available. Haven't had any problems other than my wife who seems to always want to play a recording "on the other drive"!

I actually found how to do this by trial, I was heading to New Zealand to ride for a month and my 1TB drive was already half full. I hooked up the BlacX and shoved in a 2nd drive, low and behold the box recognized and formatted it, while still having the original drive configured. I found I could swap drives with no problem. The tricky part is knowing what is recorded on each drive, if you select a recording that is on the "other drive" you get a blue screen warning to delete or cancel, you have to select cancel to retain the link to the other drive. Not a limousine but it works for me ;)
 
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