Question: I have a Dish Satellite Hopper 3. It has an option for an external hard drive. I went to plug into it a Western Digital 8TB external hard drive and nothing happened. Afterwards, in looking this up on the dish site, it appears the max external drive capacity is only 7TB. When I purchased the 8 TB drive, it was a choice between 4TB and 8TB was only about a $20 difference, so I went with the larger one. I’ve not even seen a 7TB drive anywhere.
Does anyone know of a way to actually connect this and get it to work? Do I need to do something to the hard drive prior to connecting it to the Hopper 3?
Also, there is a USB 2.0 and 3.0 connection on the Hopper. The online guide on the DISH website says I can only use the 2.0. My WD hard drive comes with a USB 3.0. Previously, I had a 1 TB external drive connected using the 3.0 USB cord. Am I missing something here?
Thanks for any help or insight.
Answer:USB 3.0 is downward compatible with 2.0, so this should not be a problem. In fact I have an 8TB WD Elements connected to a USB 2.0 port on my PC.
A 7TB capacity limit is a bizarre spec. I don’t understand it at all. If your drive is an Elements (not a My Book), then it may be possible to cut its capacity with a Host Protected Area (HPA), assuming your particular model supports it. However, the HPA feature set has been rendered obsolete in recent ATA standards, so this may not be an option.
Note that WD external drives will often be configured with a 4KB sector size (Bytes Per Physical Sector = 4096), so this may cause problems for your Dish. WD has a “quick formatter” tool which can change the sector size to 512 bytes, but this is data destructive.
C:WINDOWSsystem32>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo g:NTFS Volume Serial Number : ?0xnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnNTFS Version : ?3.1LFS Version : ?1.1Total Sectors : ?15,627,982,847 (7.3 TB)Total Clusters : ?1,953,497,855 (7.3 TB)Free Clusters : ?1,452,617,418 (5.4 TB)Total Reserved Clusters : ?1,024 (4.0 MB)Reserved For Storage Reserve : ?0 (0.0 KB)Bytes Per Sector : ?512Bytes Per Physical Sector : ?4096Bytes Per Cluster : ?4096Bytes Per FileRecord Segment : 1024Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0Mft Valid Data Length : ?1.31 GBMft Start Lcn : ?0x00000000000c0000Mft2 Start Lcn : ?0x0000000000000002Mft Zone Start : ?0x0000000000000000Mft Zone End : ?0x0000000000000000MFT Zone Size : ?0.00 KBMax Device Trim Extent Count : 0Max Device Trim Byte Count : 0Max Volume Trim Extent Count : 62Max Volume Trim Byte Count : 0x40000000Resource Manager Identifier : -