# Bolt 500 to 2TB - Any benefit in doing more than simple plug-n-play upgrade?



## tluxon (Feb 28, 2002)

I should be getting a Bolt 500 from TiVo tomorrow, and since I'm likely to be getting another one within the year, I decided that an upgrade to a 2TB drive would be sufficient for the first one. For the new drive I chose the 2TB WD Blue WD20NPVZ because it was in the same family of drives that TiVo puts in the Bolt+ and it was on sale on Amazon Prime for $117 and 2-day shipping. I've received the drive already and wonder if there's any benefit to doing anything more than a simple plug-n-play swap for the Bolt's 500GB drive after it's had a chance to do a couple network connects for updating.

Any advice? Thanks.


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## fcfc2 (Feb 19, 2015)

I don't know that it is necessary, but I believe I read here that running the drive through MFSR before putting it into regular service might help a bit with the wear and tear. I did that with a 3TB Toshiba. I doubt that it would do any harm though.


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## tluxon (Feb 28, 2002)

fcfc2 said:


> I don't know that it is necessary, but I believe I read here that running the drive through MFSR before putting it into regular service might help a bit with the wear and tear. I did that with a 3TB Toshiba. I doubt that it would do any harm though.


Hmmm - I guess I misunderstood what MFSR was for. In reading the early posts I got the impression that it might've been designed exclusively for drives with a secondary media partition that starts just below 2TB and goes to the end of the drive. This is because of the mention in the first post of it not working on 2TB and smaller drives and somewhat because of the back-and-forths I was having with some of its developers (ggieseke, jmbach and nooneuknow) beginning in post #9531 of the "Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ" thread in the TiVo Series3 HDTV DVRs forum.

I believe it WOULD be valuable to address the data misalignment issue ignored by TiVo on ANY advanced format drive so that the number of read-chunk - write-chunk cycles would be made more efficient and thus reduce wear and tear. I just wasn't aware that MFSR would do this for a 2TB or smaller drive. Also, I was pretty sure that MFSR was for running on the drive AFTER it gets formatted by the Roamio/Bolt. I guess I'll pop it into the Bolt and let the Bolt format it and then use MFSTools to look at the resulting partition table.


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## jth tv (Nov 15, 2014)

I did Not use MFSR with a Roamio Basic 3TB replacement and it has been working great. I'd rather just let TiVo take care of it.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

jth tv said:


> I did Not use MFSR with a Roamio Basic 3TB replacement and it has been working great. I'd rather just let TiVo take care of it.


MFSR only works with drives in the 3-8 TB range. I could probably rewrite it to align the application and inode zones on smaller drives, but the demand for that would probably be limited to a handful of diehard enthusiasts. Most people won't bother if they can just plug it in and let the TiVo do its thing.


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## tluxon (Feb 28, 2002)

ggieseke said:


> MFSR only works with drives in the 3-8 TB range. I could probably rewrite it to align the application and inode zones on smaller drives, but the demand for that would probably be limited to a handful of diehard enthusiasts. Most people won't bother if they can just plug it in and let the TiVo do its thing.


Thanks for confirming this.

It seems logical to me that TiVo may have updated their OS for Bolts to work with advanced format drives in native mode (4k) rather than in 512e mode, since I suspect all their OEM drives are now advanced format. At the same time, I could see why they might just keep using the same OS they've used on legacy models where advanced format drives were handled with 512 byte emulation. Can you confirm one or the other?


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

tluxon said:


> Thanks for confirming this.
> 
> It seems logical to me that TiVo may have updated their OS for Bolts to work with advanced format drives in native mode (4k) rather than in 512e mode, since I suspect all their OEM drives are now advanced format. At the same time, I could see why they might just keep using the same OS they've used on legacy models where advanced format drives were handled with 512 byte emulation. Can you confirm one or the other?


Bolts are almost identical to Roamios as far as the disk partitioning scheme and MFS layout. All of the partition start addresses are 4k aligned, and since the media 'zones' start at the first byte of the media partitions there are no problems there. The app and inode zones get shoved into the MFS application partitions willy-nilly after a bunch of header fields with the exact same layout that's been around since the Series 1s came out. Somehow that never seems to work out correctly for 4k drives and the actual data in those zones is misaligned. MFSR just slides them forward a few 512-byte sectors to correct the alignment and overall it actually ends up wasting fewer sectors than the factory layout.

TiVo's first attempt at 4k alignment was actually the 2TB Premiere Elite. They aligned the media partitions correctly, but the 746 & 748 models had to live with the old layout. Most of the 320GB, 500GB & 1TB drives back then weren't advanced format, so it didn't really matter.


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## tluxon (Feb 28, 2002)

After doing the guided setup and pairing of the CableCARD with the stock drive and then recording a number of shows, I swapped in the new drive last night and went through the guided setup process again. Before swapping the drive I had two weeks of guide information and now with the new drive I only have guide data to the end of today after about 16 hours.

I've been recording and buffering Conference Tournament basketball games all day, so I haven't done another restart yet. Any thoughts on why it seems to not be getting any more guide data? Or am I just going to have to do another restart before investigating further?

More info that may be pertinent:
After getting the new drive setup in the Bolt, I logged onto TiVo.com and selected about 500GB of shows to transfer from our Premiere to the Bolt. Files have been transferring just fine and very quickly. I've even been able to download a number of the using kmttg and it all seems to be working correctly. The drive is now about 20% full - primarily with transferred files - and files are still transferring. I mention this because when I check on the Network Connection Progress, I see that the "Loading info" step has been stuck at 2% since I first checked it about an hour ago. Perhaps it is so busy with the TiVo.com transferring management that it's waiting for that transferring to stop before finishing the Loading info step.


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## tluxon (Feb 28, 2002)

As I pretty much suspected, I waited till the last batch of transfers finished and restarted the TiVo. The Network Connection completed and the guide is now fully populated.


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