Just to be clear on this..
Dish charges a one time fee of $40 that covers all the ViP series
DVR receivers on the account. There is no limit on how many drives you can use.
Not yet said but Dish will also charge $40 to activate the
DVR feature on the ViP211 non-
DVR receiver effectively turning this receiver into a
DVR but only if a hard drive is hooked to it.
The drives for the
DVR models and non-
DVR model get formatted differently so they may not be inter-shared between other types of receivers. If you have more than one ViP211 on the account, they may share the hard drive amongst themselves. If you try to share a hard drive between different types of receivers (a non-
DVR to a
DVR, for example), you will cause the drive to be reformatted and everything on it will be erased. You have been warned.
Also, do NOT try to hook your drive up to a computer to view a movie recorded from Dish. Here too you will loose everything on the drive.
Dish will offer support for hard drives up to 750 gigs. Larger drives have successfully been used but if you do this, you are on your own if something goes wrong. Talk is that sometime later they will increase the limit on how big the drives can be.
A few months ago I found WD 750 gig 2.0 USB drives for $110 at Best Buy. At that price, I bought 3.
