FreeAgent Products

[JaxRocky]

Hello,

I have a Seagate Free Agent Pro (500GB) External drive. I can't get the Model # because I can't hook the drive up to a PC. Long story made short, we got the drive to attach to our Dish Network DVR receiver as an External Hard Drive. When we hooked it up initially, Dish does some 'formatting' of its own to the drive and then you copy your saved movies off to the drive.

Problem is now that we've got things copied on the Seagate drive, once it goes into sleep mode, when we access the drive through the Dish interface, the Dish recordings disappear (not the interface, just the recordings in the list). It doesn't seem like Dish is sending a 'wake-up' call to the drive. The only way to get the Dish software to 'see' the list of recordings again is to sort of 'reboot' the Seagate drive by unplugging the USB connection and re-plugging it into the Dish receiver. I know that can't be the best way to handle this.

Has anyone else out there used a Seagate Free Agent Pro drive for this purpose? If so, can you tell me if I can move the drive to a PC, disable the sleep mode, and then reconnect to the Dish receiver without messing anything up?

Please don't suggest I call Dish - their technicians are CLUELESS about the function of the External Drive feature (as are the folks in their customer service department).

Any help at all will be *greatly* appreciated.

Thanks,

Brenda

[Melonade]

i dont know if disabling the sleep on a pc will keep it disabled while its on the dish but id definitely try it

[jh1 · Accepted solution]

Since this is an old message, others may have resolved the problem already.  However, I just bought a Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1TB external drive for my Dish DVR external memory.  I had the same problem--namely, when the drive is not used for awhile, the power saving function puts the drive to sleep and then the next time the DVR tries to use it, it comes up in a variety of ways but not fully alive.  Sometimes all the files were gone and other times some of the functions would not work.  Unplugging the disk power and rebooting it always fixed the problem.  Seagate support was of no help at all.

I followed the following sequence of steps to fix it and it now works perfectly with the Dish DVR.

1.  I downloaded the Seagate Manager software (a zip file) for the FreeAgent Desk products from the Seagate web site.  It is called FreeAgentCN.  I installed it.

2.  I connected the drive to my Vista-based PC.

3.  On the PC I went through the following menus: Start--Settings--Control Panel--Administrative Tools-- Computer Management--Storage--Disk Management.  All the drives came up including the one that had been reformatted by Dish.  It had three partitions.  I right clicked on each partition and did Delete Volume on each.  Then I selected the drive and did a Quick Format (the full format would take hours).

4.  I started the Seagate Manager and selected the Seagate drive.  I found the setup menu and went to Manage Power (I think that was the title).  There, I set the Power Save setting to "Never".

5.  I then reinstalled the drive on the Dish DVR, formatted it and it has worked perfectly ever since.

The 1TB drive cost me less than $100 on sale at Best Buy--I could not find the one that is designed to work with the Dish DVRs.  I think the only difference is the power saving mode is disabled.  It came with a 5 year warranty which I expect to be better than the life of the HDs in the DVR--I have lost two of them in three years and lost all recorded programs in the process.   If you buy a new drive and turn off the power save feature using your PC before installing it on the Dish DVR, you will probably not have any problems.  Dish says that the drive must be powered externally and be between 50MB and 1TB in size.

UPDATE:  3/20/2011

It has now been 14 months since I installed the FreeAgent Pro Drive on my Dish DVR.  No problems so far after literally hundreds of programs have been stored and viewed from the external drive.  The interface is fast enough that I never see any slow-downs when watching HD from the external drive.

[GOODWINC]

Does the error checking degrade video/audio?

Do you really need a "dvr expander?"

[jh1]

I has now been about six months since I installed the Free Agent drive on my DVR and it has worked flawlessly--no issues at all.  I can't tell the difference between watching a HD program from the Seagate vs. from the DVR itself.  The user interface is a little different between the two but not hard to figure out.

I "needed" the DVR expander for two reasons.  First, I expect the reliability of the Seagate unit to be better than the drive in the Dish box--I have already lost two of those in three years and lost all recorded programs in the process.  The Seagate comes with a five year warranty but I don't know if that means it is more reliable than the internal DVR HD.  Second, we had never watched a single episode of NCIS until a few months ago when a friend suggested that we would really like it.  We watched a couple of episodes and got hooked.  I found new and rerun episodes on four different channels and recorded them all transfering them to the expander every couple of days.  At one point we had over 70 episodes of HD NCIS stored away so we could watch them in the proper sequence.  That's 70 hours of HD--way more than could have fit on the internal hard drive plus we have many other programs stored away waiting for a chance to view them.  It does take a minute or two once a week to manage the expander but I am happy to have the flexibility to store so many programs without having to worry about running out of space.

[cheerg]

Hi i have the same external drive you have, and i followed your instruction. but how do you install it to the dvr of direct tv, i have the latest model of dvr HR24. After i disabled the timer of the freeagent, i formatted the drive to NTSF? then i plugged it to the dvr USB, since freeagent is only usb and rebooted the the dvr, the red button. but it didnt see my drive. is there something im doing wrong. 

Thank you

[jh1]

It has been a long time since I installed the Seagate drive so my memory may not be accurate.  First, my drive went on a Dish Network box, not Directv, so I can't help you there.  As I recall though, after turning off the power saving feature all I had to do was connect the drive to the Dish box and the DVR automatically reformatted the drive.  I did have to call Dish to get the external drive feature enabled.  I didn't have to pay for it though since I am a long time customer. 

I recently had the DVR replaced because of some problems and everything on my external drive was readily available on the new DVR--didn't lose a thing.

[HotdogNeck]

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jh1 wrote:

Since this is an old message, others may have resolved the problem already.  However, I just bought a Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1TB external drive for my Dish DVR external memory.  I had the same problem--namely, when the drive is not used for awhile, the power saving function puts the drive to sleep and then the next time the DVR tries to use it, it comes up in a variety of ways but not fully alive.  Sometimes all the files were gone and other times some of the functions would not work.  Unplugging the disk power and rebooting it always fixed the problem.  Seagate support was of no help at all.

I followed the following sequence of steps to fix it and it now works perfectly with the Dish DVR.

1.  I downloaded the Seagate Manager software (a zip file) for the FreeAgent Desk products from the Seagate web site.  It is called FreeAgentCN.  I installed it.

2.  I connected the drive to my Vista-based PC.

3.  On the PC I went through the following menus: Start--Settings--Control Panel--Administrative Tools-- Computer Management--Storage--Disk Management.  All the drives came up including the one that had been reformatted by Dish.  It had three partitions.  I right clicked on each partition and did Delete Volume on each.  Then I selected the drive and did a Quick Format (the full format would take hours).

4.  I started the Seagate Manager and selected the Seagate drive.  I found the setup menu and went to Manage Power (I think that was the title).  There, I set the Power Save setting to "Never".

5.  I then reinstalled the drive on the Dish DVR, formatted it and it has worked perfectly ever since.

The 1TB drive cost me less than $100 on sale at Best Buy--I could not find the one that is designed to work with the Dish DVRs.  I think the only difference is the power saving mode is disabled.  It came with a 5 year warranty which I expect to be better than the life of the HDs in the DVR--I have lost two of them in three years and lost all recorded programs in the process.   If you buy a new drive and turn off the power save feature using your PC before installing it on the Dish DVR, you will probably not have any problems.  Dish says that the drive must be powered externally and be between 50MB and 1TB in size.

UPDATE:  3/20/2011

It has now been 14 months since I installed the FreeAgent Pro Drive on my Dish DVR.  No problems so far after literally hundreds of programs have been stored and viewed from the external drive.  The interface is fast enough that I never see any slow-downs when watching HD from the external drive.

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jh1,

I signed up for this site just to THANK YOU for posting this informative guide.  I am switching to DirecTV and was trying to format my Seagate external drive after it was formatted by my Dish ViP 722 DVR.  I followed your instructions and now have a formatted and blank external drive ready for the DirecTV install.  I will also follow your advice (really, really, really wish I had seen this post previously to avoid all the issues with having to power cycle it nearly daily when attached to the Dish DVR to get it to work properly) on how to change the setting to "never" so it doesn't go to sleep and give me problems when attached to the DirecTV DVR.

THANKS FOR YOUR HELP AND INFO!!!

[HotdogNeck]

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cheerg wrote:

Hi i have the same external drive you have, and i followed your instruction. but how do you install it to the dvr of direct tv, i have the latest model of dvr HR24. After i disabled the timer of the freeagent, i formatted the drive to NTSF? then i plugged it to the dvr USB, since freeagent is only usb and rebooted the the dvr, the red button. but it didnt see my drive. is there something im doing wrong. 

Thank you

---

cheerg,

I believe the HR24 is a DirecTV DVR, correct?  This thread is in regards to issues related to Dish Network DVR's so you may be better suited to be clear about the Satellite service you have before asking for assistance  You may end up getting detailed instructions that won't work for you and may end up causing issues for you!

I will have a DirecTV DVR (HR34) installed on Wednesday the 4th and I should be able to help you after that as I am planning on using my existing SeaGate drive with the new install.

[jh1]

HotdogNeck,

You're welcome.  With over 5000 reads of my original message I guess many people have had the same problem.  Too bad Seagate didn't put a simple warning in the getting started guide about how to use the drive with the Dish DVRs.

In five days it will be two years since I installed my FreeAgent drive with never a hitch in the operation.  A new DVR was installed sevreal months ago that has more storage than the older ones but I still store a bunch of programming on the FreeAgent to keep my DVR drive with plenty of space for programs when we are out of town.

jh1