# How do i upgrade my TiVo?



## daman1101 (Feb 19, 2008)

I have an 80 hour series 2 tivo, and am not experienced with all the language used on this website, but im still interested in upgrading my tivo with a bigger hard drive.
I dont want to replace the drive, but add on. has anyone heard of the website hinsdale? 
Im going to buy a kit, but this website seems to have larger hard drives for less money than weaknees...is weaknees a better place to buy it from?
also, can anyone tell me if its better to just buy a regular hard drive and try to install it myself?


----------



## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

Please do not add on. It increases the chance of failure significantly,,, especially if you keep the old drive!

You can purchase a brand new 500gb drive for under 100$ or a 1TB drive for under 230 if you look around.

One benefit of replacing the drive is that you have a safe backup in case anything bad happens.

You dont need to buy a kit. There is a windows application that makes the "clone" extremely easy. Look here http://mfslive.org/


----------



## rodbac (Aug 16, 2005)

> Please do not add on. It increases the chance of failure significantly,,, especially if you keep the old drive!


I won't argue about statistics, but I've had 7 Tivos (between me and my family for whom I upgraded them) from the first one to a new TivoHD, and on 5 of them I've only ever added a HD (the two newest ones are going to get upgraded this weekend), and all of them are running fine to this day.

I certainly wouldn't add a brand new hdd to a 7 year old Tivo and expect the system to last until the new one died, but adding a second new hdd to the existing new hdd won't increase failure rates in any amount you'll notice I'm willing to bet.


----------



## classicsat (Feb 18, 2004)

Replace the drive. With todays drive capacities, you won't notice 80GB. Use the money you would spend on the necessary bracket kit for a bit more capacity, or just keep the savings you'd make not buying the bracket kit.


----------



## flatcurve (Sep 27, 2007)

rodbac said:


> I won't argue about statistics, but I've had 7 Tivos (between me and my family for whom I upgraded them) from the first one to a new TivoHD, and on 5 of them I've only ever added a HD (the two newest ones are going to get upgraded this weekend), and all of them are running fine to this day.
> 
> I certainly wouldn't add a brand new hdd to a 7 year old Tivo and expect the system to last until the new one died, but adding a second new hdd to the existing new hdd won't increase failure rates in any amount you'll notice I'm willing to bet.


Whenever you add another failure point to a system, it's chances of failing will increase. If it's two brand new drives, that increase is minimal... but most people don't approach the two drive setup that way. It's usually done as an addition to an existing drive to preserve content and increase space. In those cases, the life expectancy of the system is always relative to the weakest link. I just don't think it's worth the risk.


----------



## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

Let me just say this. I was very sad when my S1 had a drive failure and even though the other drive was still working I lost all of the shows.


----------



## rodbac (Aug 16, 2005)

> Whenever you add another failure point to a system, it's chances of failing will increase.


Of course. The question is whether that increased risk is enough to worry about. I submit the answer is clearly no- the chances of a HD failure are very low.

If you have a relatively new 80 or 160 hour drive, why give up the extra space? You don't gain much reliability taking a drive out unless it's very old.



> I was very sad when my S1 had a drive failure and even though the other drive was still working I lost all of the shows.


You lose your shows with a HD failure whether there are one or two in there. You increase your odds a touch putting two in there, but the failure rate is extremely low. Don't worry about it- take the extra space.


----------



## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

You keep telling us the increase in MTBF is minor but you haven't backed up the story yet. Care to cite your source? My line of work has forced me to be "involved" with data regarding storage in the enterprise and at least for that arena spindle count drastically increases failure rate. I've had to size systems with one chassis half full of hot spare drives because the failure rate is so high.


----------



## tivoupgrade (Sep 27, 2000)

ciper said:


> You keep telling us the increase in MTBF is minor but you haven't backed up the story yet. Care to cite your source? My line of work has forced me to be "involved" with data regarding storage in the enterprise and at least for that arena spindle count drastically increases failure rate. I've had to size systems with one chassis half full of hot spare drives because the failure rate is so high.


Have to agree with you, big time, on that one, having come out of the enterprise storage business myself.

But more specifically, these days, as we see more and more aging units, we have people contacting us due to bad drives...and of the units we see that are upgraded and failing, dual-drive units outnumber single-drive units 2:1...

So, if you have the option, replace your drive if you can; if you have the skills and your original drive is still good, copy it over to the new one. Or hire a sponsor to do it for you. Either way, the best practice is to replace, not to add.


----------



## bmgoodman (Dec 20, 2000)

rodbac said:


> Of course. The question is whether that increased risk is enough to worry about. I submit the answer is clearly no- the chances of a HD failure are very low.
> 
> If you have a relatively new 80 or 160 hour drive, why give up the extra space? You don't gain much reliability taking a drive out unless it's very old.
> 
> You lose your shows with a HD failure whether there are one or two in there. You increase your odds a touch putting two in there, but the failure rate is extremely low. Don't worry about it- take the extra space.


The extra drive adds heat as well and I think that shortens the life of *everything* in the Tivo.


----------



## rodbac (Aug 16, 2005)

*sigh*

Google published a study in 2007 that showed *very* little correlation between failure rates and either high temperatures (within reason) or activity.

[edit- here you go:]
http://209.85.163.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Further, failure rates for HDDs in general tend to be measured in fractions of a percentage point.

Now, of course fewer parts in a unit makes it _theoretically_ more reliable. My point, and it stands, is that this theoretical improvement is minuscule and isn't worth worrying about in the face of increasing your storage 15-30%.

[edit2]

All this said, I don't even know if you can add a second drive to the HD or S3 internally, so the point is moot for those models.


----------



## tivoupgrade (Sep 27, 2000)

rodbac said:


> *sigh*
> 
> Google published a study in 2007 that showed *very* little correlation between failure rates and either high temperatures (within reason) or activity.
> 
> ...


roadbac, you may have missed my previous post. a 2:1 ratio is far from minuscule, and i'm certain that my sample size is sufficient enough to draw such a conclusion.

your point is taken, but the reality of the situation is that TiVo boxes with a single drive are significantly more reliable than boxes with two drives.

that doesn't mean that it is a bad idea to upgrade to a two drive system or even add a drive to an existing one, however the reality of the situation is that the risk of a drive failure with two drives, vs one, is more than minuscule.

if it weren't, we'd see just as many single drive systems failing as dual-drive systems, and interestingly, we have a lot more single drive systems in the field than dual drive systems. ie - #1 problem we see these days when there are hardware failures? dual drive units with at least one bad hard drive in them...


----------



## rodbac (Aug 16, 2005)

> roadbac, you may have missed my previous post. a 2:1 ratio is far from minuscule,


I'm not going to continue arguing about it as I think the merits of both arguments are clear (whatever you think they are)...

However, doubling your chances of something happening that only happens 0.7% of the time, as I said, is a very small increase in your risk.



> if it weren't, we'd see just as many single drive systems failing as dual-drive systems, and interestingly, we have a lot more single drive systems in the field than dual drive systems. ie - #1 problem we see these days when there are hardware failures? dual drive units with at least one bad hard drive in them...


Assuming this is true (and I have no reason to doubt you), I'll submit there could be a lot of factors at play in this, because plainly, HDDs don't fail often enough (unpredictably, eg. not from old age- HDs fail 100% of the time if you wait long enough) to lead to a big difference in their numbers.

How many of your single-drive systems are replacement drives and not OEM? How old are the dual-drive systems that are failing? How old were the drives and were they the same age? Which drive failed- the OEM or the other? Did users become less likely to add drives when storage increased (read: in newer units)?

Those questions are rhetorical of course, but it's obvious there are a lot of factors that could be in play that are at least as likely (and arguably much more so) a cause as going from one to two items that have failure rates under a percentage point.


----------



## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

Besides drive failure rates I also know that using two drives without staggered spin up puts substantial load on the UPS during power up causing some not to boot. I know most of us leave the Tivo running all the time but the issue was bad enough that a vendor started to sell in line power up timers. 

"unpredictably, eg. not from old age"
Explain what you mean? Drives have a measured time between failures which is essentially related to age. From what I know drive life is directly effected by its duty cycle and hours of operation. 

In fact many inexperienced IT people will choose SATA over SAS because of the price difference. They don't realize the failure specifications published are for low duty cycle use which is not directly comparable to the 100% duty cycle of the SAS drives. When you have hundreds of individual drives the failure rate comparisons are easy to see.

BTW on an unrelated note, people like to tell the story about google running a bunch of motherboards on bakers racks. Google sees that it is not energy or space efficient to do this and are going for higher density units. Even 1u machines are not dense enough so they are going for some currently NDA style hardware from one of the more well known Intel based server vendors.


----------



## tivoupgrade (Sep 27, 2000)

roadbac, 

i think you actually made my point for me - ie. its not a statistical analysis that influences what i consider to be best practices, its observable results.

now granted, i've always "felt" the way i have for some time, perhaps too strongly given your statistical analysis. but given all of the other factors involved, that helps to season my recommendation.

as for the 'rhetorical' questions, they are still good ones. most of what i see are relatively new drives added to relatively old ones. hence influencing my recommendation of "don't add, replace"

you could argue that replacing with two vs one represents a negligible risk based on your analysis. i'd argue that replacing with one is still better because it is still easier and less likely for a clumsy person to botch a two drive installation; but i'll concede the point that its fundamentally a bad idea to replace with two vs one from a risk/reward related to the drive failure statistics alone

BTW on the previous posters comment on heat... i would agree that heat, as long as within a normal operating environment, should not be a factor. I have seen some scenarios where cooling in two-drive scenarios with very chunky brackets is definitely compromised. Its not a widespread issue (because we just don't see that many bad units to draw that conclusion) but clearly if you are running in a very hot environment, with a unit sitting on top of a top-venting AV receiver, you might think twice about adding more heat to the equation, rather than less. What I can say is that pound for pound the drives we are seeing today, run a lot cooler than the ones we were installing seven years ago.


----------



## rodbac (Aug 16, 2005)

> "unpredictably, eg. not from old age"
> Explain what you mean? Drives have a measured time between failures which is essentially related to age. From what I know drive life is directly effected by its duty cycle and hours of operation.


Yes- when we talk about "drive failure", I assume we're not referring to one or the other wearing out years down the road, which all drives will do, whether there are one or two in the box.

I mean that my discussion centers on failures that occur from, say, a faulty drive. It craps out on you a few months down the road... that type of thing.



> most of what i see are relatively new drives added to relatively old ones. hence influencing my recommendation of "don't add, replace"


Maybe I've misunderstood, then. I would never recommend adding a new drive to a couple year old Tivo. I've been assuming we're talking about expanding your shiny new Tivo.



> i'd argue that replacing with one is still better because it is still easier and less likely for a clumsy person to botch a two drive installation;


Agreed.


----------

