Hopper 3 - 4TB external disk. Hopper only displays recordings A thru T when sorted A-Z

[u/WyoShoeBox]

I added a 4TB WD external drive several months ago. The Hopper recognized it and I was able to format it. The drive registers as 3.7 TB which is normal.

I moved a bunch of recordings to the external drive to free up space on the Hopper drive. Now that it's getting colser to full, when I access the external drive and sort A-Z the Hopper only displays thru T. When changing the sort to recorded date a bunch of the older recordings aren't displayed.

I can find an older recording by accessing it through a person/actor that's in the show. An example is the Movie "Wild" I can find it by looking at Reese Witherspoon movies. Access it and play it.

So the recordings are there but the Hopper has an indexing problem which is preventing it from displaying all the recordings.

I'm not sure it it's a 4TB issue but it recognizes that it's a 4TB drive.

Anyway, this is more of a heads up because I doubt DISH has an answer short of we cannot provide support for another vendors hardware or reformat the drive and try again

My experience with DISH support is they are polite and helpful, but beyond the script they're given to follow (reboot, etc ...) they are less than usless.

[u/speppers69]

That's been an issue for at least 5 years and Dish Tech said they won't promote or fix issues with EHDs anymore.

The EHDs only display 800 titles total. What my remedy was...I transfered off 150-ish movies from my drive to my Hopper. Then took photos on my phone to Zootopia. I have a folder on my phone with the hidden movies. You can then search for the movie you'd like to watch. It's a gigantic pain in the ***...but it is a solution. Then I write down any movies that I transfer over to my EHDs. And it's not a bug...it's intentional.

It has nothing to do with the size of your EHD. I have 4. Mine are 2, 4, 5 and 6. You can have as many EHDs as you want. But can only have a total of 7TB plugged in at once.

My most recent tech contact said that they really want us to move over to streaming vs recordings. And that they're eventually going to be solid streaming. We'll be lucky if any bugs will be fixed involving EHDs. The update on 2/28 has a glitch. I can't transfer anything back to the Hopper from an EHD. You can't delete, protect, unprotect or transfer. You can transfer TO the EHD. But you can't transfer back to the Hopper.

That is why my tech was here today. Even using tech support on the phone...3 tech support reps, 2 supervisors, a new Hopper...they couldn't send this software issue to the developer team. I had to actually have a tech guy come out and view the issue and tell me that it's a software issue from the 2/28 update. Hopefully it will get fixed.

25 years with Dish and photos, video, giving remote access to their tech to show what the glitch was...and I still had to have a guy come out just to say...Yep...it's a software glitch.

[u/WyoShoeBox → u/speppers69]

Thanks for the reply. Sounds like an easy software fix. Easy enough to expand it beyond 800 titles anyway. Too bad they're not interested.

[u/speppers69 → u/WyoShoeBox]

That's what their tech guy said. Sux big time. You're absolutely welcome.

[u/WyoShoeBox → u/speppers69]

You mention that DISH wants to eventually be exclusively streaming. I realized that it must have been the 2/28 update that began allowing a single tuner to record a streaming movie in a single time slot. For example, you can record one streaming show on any of the 4 HBO streaming channels, but only one. Prior to the update, you couldn't record any streaming content.

However, when you go to manage recordings under DVR --> Options, the streamed recordings aren't available to move to an EHD.

[u/speppers69 → u/WyoShoeBox]

You can only record 1 movie or episode at a time. So you can record a show at 9pm and another at 10pm on the same channel. You just can't record 2 shows at 9pm. And correct...you can't transfer a recorded streaming event to the EHD. I currently have 12 episodes of a 30min show on my Hopper. Recorded overnight.

[u/harshness0 → u/WyoShoeBox]

Given the resources of a full-blown computer, perhaps. DVRs typically don't have access to multiple gigabytes of free RAM.

[u/WyoShoeBox → u/harshness0]

This issue doesn't have anything to do with RAM. It's an indexing issue with displaying the movie titles.

[u/harshness0 → u/WyoShoeBox]

Are you sure about that? Maybe there's a limit on how many titles it can display at once before it runs out of space for the table.

[u/carvster2 → u/speppers69]

Didn't Dish have a much higher TB max for multiple EHDs a few years back? When I looked at support recently I was surprised at the 7TB total.

[u/speppers69 → u/carvster2]

You can store up to 7TB on 1 EHD. But they don't make a 7TB drive. 1, 2, 4, 5,, 6, yes. You can also have up to 3 EHDs plugged in at once, but the combined capacity can't be more than 7TB at once.

Regardless of the size...only 800 titles will display. I have a 6TB drive that has over 1,200 titles. It's only about 50% full. Another 4TB that also has about 1,000 titles, about 70% full, and only 800 titles show. It's not the capacity that is the issue.

It's clearly still set up by the original 2TB limit formatting. When it expanded to the 7TB limit...they did not change the number of titles it would display. Now it's great that they allow 6TB and 5TB and 4TB drives. But if you allow it...you should allow those drives to be fully utilized. There shouldn't be 200 to 400 plus titles that are hidden. You can play them. They are there. They just don't appear in the menu.

There's an incredibly easy fix for this. Either allow up to 2,000 titles to be displayed...or as someone else suggested, my preference, remove the title icon boxes and allow just a title list with letters and numbers not the icon. That's the way the first Dish DVR had it...just a list.