Seagate reveals Showcase external HDD: for media centers and DVRs
By Darren Murph 
posted May 19th 2008 11:24AM
posted May 19th 2008 11:24AM
Great, just great. Soon after Western Digital made a fool of itself by introducing an external hard drive "certified" for use with DISH Network HD DVRs, along comes Seagate to further fuel the hype machine. Announced at this year's Cable Show (after being mentioned at CES), the Showcase storage solution is "designed" to extend storage capacity of DVRs and media centers. In a similar vein, the outfit's newest drives are "compatible with Motorola's s-SATA-capable HD DVRs," and they also come with USB 2.0 ports and up to 1TB of space. No word on a price or any of that jazz, but those who can't figure out that an external hard drive is an external hard drive can look for 'em to land in Q3.
To be fair, most of existing name-brand eSATA external HDD are not compatible with SA DVRs. Those SA boxes are very picky about eSATA boxes for whatever reasons.
@foxb
I believe it's because SA DVRs don't like 3Gbit/s SATA drives - they only accept the older, 1.5 Gbit/s SATA drives.
The good thing is usually 3Gbit/s SATA drives have jumpers that let you set them into "1.5 Gbit/s mode", then the SA DVRS will see them.
i just hope these devices will work on the Directv HR20, hr21 series esata receivers .
I should mention too that [I believe] Dish does not record directly to their external drive -- it's just used for archiving (which is why it's USB). My comments apply to DVRs that record/play directly from the external eSATA drive. It's likely that for Dish DVR use, any old USB external drive would suffice.
What about for Verizon FiOS and Comcast Cable DVR's? Oh Wait, they don't allow external drives.
Dropped the ball, yet again...