How big is the harddrive in a 150hr dvr from dish network?

Question

I always wanted to know. Also when you watch tv and keep it running it records what ever is being showed while your watching it so you can rewind and stuff. Does this take space out of the harddrive? because it still shows 150hrs of time left, even after 30 minutes of live tv.

Answer 1

The number of hours the DVR can record in SD is also the size of the hard drive in GB.  So, a DVR that can hold 150 hours of SD recordings means it has 150 GB hard drive.

If your DVR has a USB port, you can enable a feature that lets you plug in an external hard drive for extra storage.  You have to call Dish Network for this and pay a one time fee of $35 (boo).

The "live TV" buffer does not use up your hard drive space.  So if your DVR says it has 150 hours left, that's 150  hours of SD recordings - not counting the live buffer.  The buffer only holds 30 minutes of TV at most, unless you or the DVR change the channel which will empty the buffer entirely.

Keep in mind, that recording in HD will take up 6 times as much space as non-HD.  So while I have a "200 hour HD-DVR" in reality this means it can hold some combination of 200 hours of SD programming, or just over 33 hours in HD.