My DirecTV HD dvr suffers from pauses / freezes in picture and sound.
Well I should say it did suffer from the above symptoms, I fixed it myself !!!!
I tried calling DirecTV support and of course I went round and round with them, they said it was everything from my satellite signal strength to blaming my television.
I then used trusty google to see if anyone else had these problems, of course tons of people on the internet had the exact same problem, but I saw one solution that made alot of sense.
It was plug in an external sata drive and it will take over for the internal drive, it makes sense the drive in my dvr has been on 24 hours a day for 2 or 3 years working hard.
My Symptoms:
1. When watching a recorded show the sound and screen would pause, sometime freeze and would require a reboot of the DVR.
2. It never happened on a show that I watched in real time, but if I paused it and built up time in the buffer it would usually do it.
My Solution:
I called DirecTV and they were pretty useless, after a couple of more calls they said they would replace it but want me to pay the shipping, I thought that was stupid since its a tool they use to get me to send them a check each month, my plan was to cancel when my contract was up. I then searched the internet and read tons of message boards about people having the same problem. One guy simply said plug a esata drive into the esata port, it will take over for the built in drive and the problem will be fixed. I figured I would give it a shot since I could always use the drive event if it didn't fix the problem. Logically it did make sense since my dvr has been on and the internal drive spinning for about 2 years 24 hours a day. So I bought a Seagate Black Armor WS 110 drive at office depot for $119. Didn't read anything bad about it on the internet, didn't do much research I just went and bought it and stopped by Frys for a Esata Cable office depots only cable was $12.99.
Install:
1. I shutdown the DVR and unplugged the power, internet says the internal drive spins even when system is shutdown.
2. Unboxed the new drive and cable, plugged it into my UPS and into my DVR.
3. I powered on the DVR and a message popped up briefly that the system was formatting external storage. I do mean brief it was only there for about 30 seconds.
4. As expected all of my prior recordings were gone and my scheduled recordings.