# S2 - 750GB IDE PATA Hard Drive Recommendations?



## Droid420 (Aug 29, 2006)

I am looking to max out my 2 Series 2's. They both have 300gb Maxtor IDE drives in them. One clicks and freezes and the other one is just too loud. Is there a compatibility chart like they have for the S3's in this thread?

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784

Price is also a major factor since I have to buy 2 of them. Is it possible to use a SATA drive with an adaptor?


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## dwit (May 5, 2004)

Droid420 said:


> I am looking to max out my 2 Series 2's. They both have 300gb maxtor drives in them. One clicks and freezes and the other is just too loud. Is there a compatibility chart like they have for the S3's in this thread?
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784
> 
> Price is also a major factor since I have to buy 2 of them. *I am also willing to use a SATA drive with an adaptor if it's possible*.


If that's the case, then "max out" would be using 1 TB drive(s).

There's no chart for S2s probably because just about any ide drive has been demonstrated to be satisfactory for somebody. Any ide drive will work in an S2. Actually, there may even be a chart/thread on the subject. It's just liable to be very, very old. S2s have been being upgraded, probably since they were introduced.

Some Seagate Barracudas are thought(known) to be a little loud, relatively speaking. Might be a consideration if using in a bedroom.

Also check out this thread: Spike's 2 TB S2 at mfslive.org

Also, since it seem's noise is a consideration for you, I guess don't get a Seagate Barracuda or Seagate made Maxtor. The noise in most other drives can be toned down with the Hitachi Drive Tools and/or their own utilities, even the pre-Seagate Maxtors.


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## Droid420 (Aug 29, 2006)

Well, the max I have found online for IDE/PATA is 750gb. Thanks for the link you supplied, I read it and found that Spike used SATA drives with Addonics ADSAIDE - SATA to ATA adapters on a TCD540040 (same model I have). I will eventually replace my S2's with S3's so SATA with an adaptor may be the best way to go since I could always use the SATA drives on an S3.


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## dwit (May 5, 2004)

The max for ide is 750, but since you said you were willing to use SATA with adapter...


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## Droid420 (Aug 29, 2006)

I decided to go with a SATA adaptor/SATA drive setup.

I looked at the following 2 adaptors.

http://3btech.net/seatatoideco.html

http://www.amazon.com/Addonics-ADSA...ie=UTF8&s=miscellaneous&qid=1213894163&sr=8-1

I wanted the Addonics ADSAIDE from Amazon but it was almost 30 bucks so I bought 3 of the cheaper one for about the same price. Now to look for 1TB SATA drives, lol. Thanks for your help dwit!


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## nigebj (Sep 8, 2004)

Droid420 said:


> I decided to go with a SATA adaptor/SATA drive setup.


I've looked at this a couple of times, but not pulled the trigger. One reason is that reading reviews of the PATA/SATA adaptors it seemed that many have intermittent issues read/write or offline issues. I was nervous about relying on that for such a critical application (much more critical than a corporate file server you understand). Anyway, I'd be really interested to hear how you get on - especially any gotchas you encounter.

Good luck!


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

Before you turn your Tivos into a huge repository for recorded shows, here's some food for thought. Whatever drive you install today will eventually die. If you are fortunate you may be able to recover the data and transfer it to a replacement drive before this happens. Unfortunately, this is the exception to the rule and you will most likely lose everything you have on your Tivo drive.

My point is this - only keep programs on your Tivo that you can afford to lose. Don't think you can keep recordings indefinitely because at some point you will lose them. This is not speculation but a proven fact. I can't even recall the number of times I've had to upgrade Tivo drives for people that had hundreds of hours of programming only to have them all vanish with a single hard drive failure. I haven't quite figured out why people feel the need to fill up a 1TB drive with programming they'll never have time to watch. Sure you can build a 2TB Tivo but all you're doing is asking for trouble. If there's stuff you want to keep then find a way to archive it off the Tivo. Your kids are going to be very upset when all of a sudden their 100 episodes of Barney and Friends have suddenly disappeared.

My philosophy is quite simple. Only keep shows on your Tivo that you can watch within a reasonable amount of time. I have more season passes than I can count and I am literally swamped with shows to watch when there's no writer's strike going on. There's something about a Tivo that turns couch potatoes into cabbage patch kids and we end up recording more shows than ever before. I expect my family will probably launch an intervention at any time, now. In any case, I try to keep the number of shows on the Tivo down to about two week's worth of shows with but a few exceptions (I just got around to watching the first episode of "John Adams" last night). That way, if the drive dies, I haven't lost all that much and I can still retrieve my lost shows through other means.

I have two S3 Tivos with 500GB each, but I rarely fill up more than 50-60% of the drives. I also have an HTPC with a 750GB drive for my HD locals which, at the moment, has only about 1 hour of recordings on the drive. I have a lot of miscellaneous shows and movies on the Tivos but only a few hour's of season pass recordings. I watch the season pass shows first and then watch the rest when I find the time. If I lose them it's no big deal since I have about 5TB of movies stored on a server to keep me from going through withdrawal.


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## nigebj (Sep 8, 2004)

mr.unnatural said:


> Whatever drive you install today will eventually die.


This is a good point, however I don't believe it is a reason not to have a large Tivo drive - here's why.

If you care about that large collection of programming and movies, you must surely back it up. While you could burn every episode of Lost, Sex in the City, ABC News, etc to DVD - much more likely (and contemporary) is to do disc-to-disc backup. Online all the time, faster recovery, etc, etc.

So record to Tivo, online backup to hard-drive elsewhere (with Tivo Desktop or Galleon) - then the only time you have to transfer back to Tivo IS in the event of hard-drive crash on the Tivo.

I don't use TDT but Galleon automates my archiving of the Tivos recordings - so I don't have to do anything other than set the recording schedule on Tivo - and check the other machine is working fine occasionally (which I do as I feed non-local content to the Tivo for viewing).

Just another perspective on the same issue.

Nige ...


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

There's nothing wrong with having a large drive in your Tivo. I just wanted to point out one of the major pitfalls people fall into when they install a large drive. There is a natural tendency to want to use every bit of the drive. The more space you have the more you want to record. This just increases the risk of losing that much more data. I look at the extra space as overhead and added protection that allows me to record my season pass programs without running ther risk of something getting deleted prematurely. 

If you max out the capacity by recording everything that suits your fancy then you run the risk of losing shows before you watch them. Don't add a large drive just for the sake of doing so. Have a plan set forth on how you want to use that space. Personally, I like to record HD movies on my S3 and then offload them with TivoToGo or similar means so I can create my own HD-DVDs. Once the HD-DVDs have been authored I deleted the recording from the Tivo to make room for future recordings. If I were to leave them on the Tivo then it would fill up in no time with HD recordings. Some people keep shows on their Tivos forever thinking they'll be safe only to find their Tivo has died and taken all of their precious recordings to the grave.

An ideal setup would be to have two identical Tivos with large drives set up for MRV. Transfer recordings from each individual Tivo to the other one to serve as a backup. That way, if one Tivo dies you already have everything preserved. Install a new replacement drive in the Tivo and transfer all of the recordings back to the resurrected Tivo. Having a 2nd Tivo also provides you with extra flexibility to avoid scheduling conflicts. Between my two S3 Tivos and HTPC, I have a total of ten tuners available to record from so I rarely run into conflicts.


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## nigebj (Sep 8, 2004)

mr.unnatural said:


> An ideal setup would be to have two identical Tivos with large drives set up for MRV. Transfer recordings from each individual Tivo to the other one to serve as a backup. That way, if one Tivo dies you already have everything preserved. Install a new replacement drive in the Tivo and transfer all of the recordings back to the resurrected Tivo.


Not sure how the S3's do, but with MRV on the S2, I can imagine another disk failing before MRV had transferred 750Gb, let alone 2TB


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

I have a large drive with every episode of MASH and Andy Griffith. I lost all my shows when mis read an option on a script I ran. I just recorded all the shows again. It was not that big a deal. What is nice is that I can see MASH or Andy Griffith or war movies anytime I want.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

nigebj said:


> Not sure how the S3's do, but with MRV on the S2, I can imagine another disk failing before MRV had transferred 750Gb, let alone 2TB


MRV transfers are usually fairly quick (about 4-5 times faster than real time IIRC). Doing it piecemeal after a night of recording is not all that bad. Having to do a full drive over 500GB can definitely take quite a while. You can run it during off hours or even in the background without interfering with normal Tivo operations. The main thing is that it provides a safe method to backup your recordings. Backing everything up to your PC using TTG would take longer than using MRV since TTG transfers are almost equivalent to real time.

The thing is, if you plan on doing a complete drive then it might be faster just to clone the drive using MFSTools or one of the latest variants such as MFSLive or WinMFS. The only issue would be that this would only work on a hacked Tivo since you'd have to run the 51killer.tcl script to get rid of the hardware error #51 message without losing the recordings. Otherwise, you'd have to do a Clear & Delete Everything which would wipe your backed up recordings.


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