Approximately eight months ago my DVR received a software upgrade that included the ability to add external storage. Not wanting to settle for just 1 TB of storage using one of the Verizon approved external drives, I chose, instead, to buy a WD20EARS 2TB Green SATA drive that the salesperson at CompUSA said would work with my STB. I made it into an ESATA drive by installing it in an enclosure. The STB saw the drive, formatted it and then added it as external storage.
Unfortunately, it never performed correctly. It was constantly plagued with long pauses in the audio followed by video pixilation - very often to the point of not being able to watch either a live or recorded program. I talked to FIOS support several times and was offered a new STB/DVR each time. I kept thinking that it was a software problem and put up with it until a few weeks ago. . One night it got so bad that I ejected the external drive and went back to using the smaller internal drive. Surprise! NO PROBLEMS WHATSOEVER!. It was then that I decided that the problem had to be the external drive.
After some Internet research and a call to Western Digital, I determined that WD20EARS that I had purchased was the wrong type of hard drive and it would never have worked properly. It was NOT designed for streaming video but for data storage. The correct Western Digital drive can be found in the WD AV-GP family (AV=Audio Visual), specifically designed to work with PVR/DVR's, STB's, and video surveillance systems. The drives essentially have no error correction built in and thus have no problem with minor streaming glitches coming from the STB as it buffers the transmission to the drive. Since they have no error correction, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should they be used for DATA CRITICLE applications. I ended up going with a WD20EURS drive (2TB) that I installed in the enclosure. It's been up for over 24 hours and is performing flawlessly. Sure wish I had investigated sooner
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