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So last week I reported that the Cox Cable SA8240HDC SATA bug was fixed – well, it was… kinda.  I tried several hard drives and all seemed to work fine.  But then I added a Western Digital 1TB DVR Expander.  This unit was design especially for DVRs such as the SA8240HDC.  After I plugged it in, the DVR recognized it and asked to format it  – as expected.  But within a few hours the DVR started going bonkers.  This included the DVR becoming non responsive, rebooting, and finally – just going blank.  The only way to resolve this was to unplug the Western Digital DVR expander and reboot the DVR.  I tried this several times, with identical results each time.  So Cox, good job on getting the DVR to recognize and initialized external drives, now it’s time to make them work right!

For once, here are some raves to Cox Communications.  It seems like Cox has been listening and working on a fix.  I checked the firmware versions on my DVR and discovered a new release was uploaded (I’ll post firmware versions when I get to it).  I plugged in a few SATA drives and all of them were recognized, formatted, and added to the storage pool.  The drives I tested are:

1. Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9, 120GB, Model #: 6Y120M0
2. Seagate Barracuda ES.2, 500GB,  Model #: ST3500320NS
3. Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, 750GB, Model #: ST3750640A

The only reason as to why I tried these particular drives is that I had them handy.

Good job Cox!

Here is a screen capture of the updated firmware versions:

First over all a disclaimer:  I don’t have much love towards Cox Cable.  They provide inferior service at a higher cost when compared to other regional cable providers like Time Warner.  But this issue isn’t about love – it’s about their poor customer service.

Prior to upgrading to HD, we had their standard definition DVR – the SA8300 (I have several blog entries about it) and used an external SATA drive in order to increase the storage capacity.  Fast forward to the present, we now have an HDTV so we upgraded (or so we thought) to their HD capable DVR – the SA8240HDC.  Happily, I plugged the same external SATA drive I had on the SA8300 into the SA8240 – but nothing happened.  Normally, when a new drive is plugged into a DVR, the DVR brings up a dialog box acknowledging the connection of the drive and then request permission to format it.  After trying every documented and non-documented boot procedure I realized that the SA8240HDC just doesn’t want to play nice with the external SATA drive.

After doing some research online I discovered that I wasn’t alone. Apparently non of Cox Cable SA8240HDC were recognizing and formatting the external SATA drives.   This is a known problem with the specific firmware on this specific model but Cox has been refusing to fix it.  Apparently, Cisco (owner of Scientific Atlanta) has a firmware fix for it, but Cox hasn’t rolled it out.  Cox you suck!

Reference threads:

• http://www.sandiegohdtv.org/forums/thread-cox-8240hdc-not-able-to-utilize-esata
• https://secure.dslreports.com/forum/r25173512-AZ-8240HDC-will-no-longer-Format-a-New-External-HDD