Expanding DVR storage capacity

Regular HDDVR (i.e. HR24) supports a maximum of 2TB.

Genie (i.e. HR44) has no known hard cap. Was suggested 4TB in the early days, but people have used 12TB or a bit more. Though personally I find that much overkill.

External is used instead of the internal (disabled to protect against recordings being transferred or copied), so should be larger to be worth it. HR24 has 500GB and Genie has 1TB. Only eSATA can be used. R22 has a 320GB, but don't recall if it has an eSATA port. I have a couple old ones buried in storage that I need to recycle since they are not allowed to be reactivated (even though they are more capable than a Mini Genie Client).

Unplug from power. Connect external and then to power. After allowing it to bootup, then give power back to box so it boots up using the external. You can go back to using the internal for the recordings that are still saved, but not suggested to do this often as that eSATA port is delicate.

weaknees.com sells external drives with fan cooling.

Thanks for your replies and help.

My R22 does have a e-Sata port and I have a 2TB external hard drive coming. I will try it out (following your install info) on my R22 to see if its compatible.

If that works i will probably get a 4TB hard drive and use it on my Genie HR44.

Below is a rant.

The H24 I got from DirecTV a few months  ago , is no longer activatible, since I did not activate it right away, as it was to be a replacement for my R22, but I still had shows I wanted to watch that were recorded on the R22 before I deactivated the R22 and then activated the new H24 as a replacement, Unfortunately I waited too long, as DirecTV made any nonGenie  DVR obsolete and if not already activated, one can not activate any new  nonGenie  EQ, even though DirecTV will activate a nonGenie DVR if it fails under their warranty policy and they replace with the same nonGenie model.

It is almost as if they want to make people quit DirecTV Satellite service and go to DirecTV streaming. I have some internet streaming services, but my internet provider is so flaky (bad intermittent signal), i want to keep Satellite as  the steady service backup for live TV.

AT&T was pushing heavily for a Client only system as well as SWM-only. The Genie-2 (HS17) doesn't even work with anything but Clients.

I would keep an R22 over an H24 so you keep an HDDVR. As HD does take more space than SD, if an external works for that one then great.

I really hope the new co-owner of DirecTV gets equipment direction back on track. They need a SWM-only HDDVR, be it say a "HR25" (not a real model, just the next logical numbering) or a more flexible Genie model. But doubt anything good on this will be soon.