Is it possible to mount the HDD in an external caddy in such a fashion that it can be interchanged with another drive?

Is there link to some previous discussions on the subject?

I have two Foxsats and would like to interchange the discs.

I don't see why not so long as you can get the sata cable and power connected to the caddy, although I'd imagine you would have to power off the box before any hard drive swaps.

The only problem I can see is with regards to any encrypted HD material you have, as I believe you can't view encrypted programmes on different boxes, but I'm happy to be corrected on that.

Yes it's possible using an external esata cradle. I have this arrangement and I can use a seperate 1TB drive originally formatted by the hdr. There's no point though in trying to swap drives with another hdr, as already said encrypted HD recordings won't play back on a machine that did not record it.

It's easier to set up the hdr as a media server using Raydon's modified firmware to stream recorded content across a home network. This way someone else can view recorded content independently of what the main viewer is watching.

There is a hole in the base under one of the HDD caddy mounts just about large enough to squeeze a esata data cable through. My drive though is externally powered, the hdr's 12V power rail is used to switch on my internal drive, my external drive and a optical to coax s/pdif converter using a relay.

Thanks for the responses.

Can I transfer SD progs to an external HDD and then plug this external drive into a second machine and play them?

Yes you can including a PC, if you record HD using non freesat mode you can also do the same with HD. You need a EXT3 formatted drive for most HD though.