[SOLVED] Help me connect an 8TB WD external hard drive to my Hopper 3 from Dish Network?

[Curry642]

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.

 

[fzabkar]

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:\WINDOWS\system32>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo g:\

NTFS Volume Serial Number :        0xnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
NTFS Version      :                3.1
LFS Version       :                1.1
Total 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  :                512
Bytes Per Physical Sector :        4096
Bytes Per Cluster :                4096
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment    :  1024
Clusters Per FileRecord Segment :  0
Mft Valid Data Length :            1.31 GB
Mft Start Lcn  :                   0x00000000000c0000
Mft2 Start Lcn :                   0x0000000000000002
Mft Zone Start :                   0x0000000000000000
Mft Zone End   :                   0x0000000000000000
MFT Zone Size  :                   0.00 KB
Max Device Trim Extent Count :     0
Max Device Trim Byte Count :       0
Max Volume Trim Extent Count :     62
Max Volume Trim Byte Count :       0x40000000
Resource Manager Identifier :      ------------

 

[popatim]

You can try formatting a ext3 7tb partition on it. the hopper cant format anything larger then 2tb itself according to this thread
https://www.satelliteguys.us/xen/threads/best-ehd-for-the-hopper-3.382103/page-2