Scientific Atlanta (Cisco) Explorer 8300 HD

D

DeathbyPutz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 12, 2009
Messages
169
I have one of these from Comcast, and I was wondering if anyone else has tried to hook up an external hard drive to expand storage (the internal storage is a pitiful 150GB, and is only worth about 20ish hours of HD recording). It has lots of different ports (eSATA, USB, and 2 Firewire), but I would assume that only the eSATA would be adequate for real-time recording to an external drive.

I was just curious if anyone else had tried to add an external drive, what they used, and how it was working out for them. I figured that no-one on [H] would be satisfied with a vanilla cable-company-provided DVR (and would mod the crap out of theirs, if they didn't use an HTPC).
 
It's pretty easy to do. Just plug an external esata drive into the esata port on the 8300 and follow the on screen prompts to format the drive. The new drive will be added to the available storage space. Keep in mind that the drive will not be readable on anything except for the particular 8300 box you connect it to. It cannot be moved to a different 8300 box.
 
I connected an external drive to my 8300HD (Time Warner) and found that I started to get strange stuttering on all my recordings.
 
brownkc said:
I connected an external drive to my 8300HD (Time Warner) and found that I started to get strange stuttering on all my recordings.
Click to expand...

I think that's just the cable. Over the last few months, I've had strange stuttering and lag on my recordings (without an external drive) as well as while just watching live TV. I called Comcast, and they've sent technicians out to my apartment building in the past about it. Every time, they tell me that there's some nasty signal-loss. I blame the initial wiring of my building.

I've learned to live with the stutter, but only having about 20 hours of recording time is killing me (especially when I'm gone for a week, and can't catch up on everything over the weekend).

Thanks for the reassurance about how easy this "should" be. I just wanted to know if anyone had any horror stories, so that I don't make the same mistake.
 
My stuttering was tied to the external drive. It started when I first connected it and stopped after I disconnected it. This was several years ago. I don't store stuff for long on the DVR anyway so I don't have too much problem with space. Still, it would be nice to have extra room so I didn't feel like I had to monitor the hard drive space.
 
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