# 512gb SDD drive in a TiVo HD.



## TexasGrillChef (Sep 15, 2006)

It's expensive as all C**P but the perfromace boost is amazing.

I just upgraded my TiVo HD unit with a Kingston SNVP325-S2/512GB SSD drive.

I did have a 1TB drive installed in it and the extra capacity was nice. However, since I have a dedicated computer running TD+ 2.8, & several DLNA NAS devices as well as one of them being a Netgear Ultra 6. The loss in storage capacity on my second TiVo unit wasn't such a big deal.

This TiVo HD is a bedroom unit. I have an S3 for the living room.

Suffice it to say that in terms of performace boost to the menus & other parts of the TiVo, I would have to estimate at least a 40 to 50% boost in perfermance and speed. The only noise now is coming from the fan of the unit!

I was just wondering has anyone else installed a SSD drive in their TiVo's? Did you see a performance boost of any kind?

512gb of space still gives me well over 40+ hours of HD recording. Plenty for a 2nd TiVo in the house.

This upgrade did cost me $900 though. So I wouldn't recomend it for everybody.

TGC

Link:
http://www.kingston.com/ssd/vplus-series.asp


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## Thom (Jun 5, 2000)

I've been thinking about doing an SSD, but the large ones are too pricey. I thought about putting in a 30 GB SSD in the internal drive slot, and a very large SATA hardware RAID array (which mimics a single sata drive) in the external position, then hand-customizing the partition arrangement so that all the media partitions were on the external SATA array, and all other partitions (including application partitions) were on the SSD.

For example, on a typical expanded internal (A) drive, partitions A11, A13, and A15 are the large media partitions. On a typical B drive, partitions B3, B5, and B7 are the large media partitions. I was thinking of hand-copying the A11, A13, A15, B3, B5, and B7 partitions to an external hardware RAID array, and hand-copying partitions A2 through A10, A12, A14, B2, B4, and B6 to a 30 GB SSD. Then I would have to hexedit the order of the partition names where they are listed in the A10 partition data.

If it works, all menu operations, show indexing, etc, should be very fast and I will still have my 2 TB of show space. I have the hardware RAID array (Areca ARC-5030), and the 30 GB SSD would be cheap. I just haven't wanted to tear a box apart and fool with it yet.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Thanks for the info.. I've been curious about how a SSD would perform in a Tivo. I also know that the "limited writes" is less of a concern nowadays (since obviously people are using them for computer storage), though with a Tivo *ALWAYS* writing, it still seems disturbing.

Thom, it would be interesting to hear if you end up doing that and how it affects things. (Though how would you have 2 TB? Is that with a hacked image unavailable via the normal upgrade tools?)


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## windracer (Jan 3, 2003)

Do SSDs give off a lot of heat? Would it possible that the fan isn't even that necessary? It would cool (no pun intended) for a bedroom unit to be totally silent.

Nice upgrade!


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## TexasGrillChef (Sep 15, 2006)

windracer said:


> Do SSDs give off a lot of heat? Would it possible that the fan isn't even that necessary? It would cool (no pun intended) for a bedroom unit to be totally silent.
> 
> Nice upgrade!


SSD's produce only 10-20% of the heat of a normal HD because their isn't any mechanical friction heat created like their is from heads tossing back and forth and the spinning discs.

Not saying they don't get hot, just they produce alot less heat.

If I used a 2.5" hd heat sink case and inproved the heat sink on the proccessor of the TiVo, then I would say you could get by with a fanless TiVo

TGC


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## ScratchFury (Feb 12, 2005)

Finally! Thank you for the answer to the SSD question. Now I'm wondering if the Momentus XT gives a noticeable improvement over a standard hard drive. I'd think it would "learn" to put the menu stuff in the SSD part and the shows in the spinning part.


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## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

The only real problem with the SSD is the TiVo is the worst possible load to put on it - it's constantly being written to 24/7 which they don't really like. There's a limited life cycle on them, so a constant write tends to prematurely wear it out.

Doesn't mean it won't last a long time, though. A good quality one will probably serve for years. A cheap low-grade one can die in just a few months.


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## GreenMonkey (May 28, 2008)

That's pretty awesome. Too rich for my blood though.

I love my 60GB Agility SSD on my desktop. Soo nice. Will get one into my laptop when I get a chance.

One big enough for the Tivo would be pretty expensive. An SLC SSD would last forever though


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## TexasGrillChef (Sep 15, 2006)

Worf said:


> The only real problem with the SSD is the TiVo is the worst possible load to put on it - it's constantly being written to 24/7 which they don't really like. There's a limited life cycle on them, so a constant write tends to prematurely wear it out.
> 
> Doesn't mean it won't last a long time, though. A good quality one will probably serve for years. A cheap low-grade one can die in just a few months.


You are correct in that. However, on the unit that I have in use currently is warrantied for 5 years & has a MTBF rate of 1 MILLION hours.

Now add that up. In the next 5 years I am sure your going to either:

A.... Buy a new TiVo.

Or

B.... Want to upgrade the size of the Hard drive anyways. Maybe by that time a 1tb or 2tb SSD drive will be available at an afordable cost.

So IMHO.... Sure their are limited writes that the SSD can handle. However the number of writes that it CAN do BEFORE it wears out is WAY more than you will ever get too. While what you say is true, all I am saying is that number of writes is well above any amount you would get to even with your TiVo running & writing 24/7.

SSD drives are currently being used in some 24/7 servers & workstations.

FYI... just got of the phone with tech support for the drive. The number of writes that can be done to any one sector (Memory location) is 9 Trillion Trillion times. Which takes about 1 MILLION hours of constant writing to the drive to achieve.

1 Million hours is their MTBF rate. Which works out too: 41,666 days or 114 years. I think the drive will outlast your TiVo box.

TGC


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## TexasGrillChef (Sep 15, 2006)

GreenMonkey said:


> That's pretty awesome. Too rich for my blood though.
> 
> I love my 60GB Agility SSD on my desktop. Soo nice. Will get one into my laptop when I get a chance.
> 
> One big enough for the Tivo would be pretty expensive. An SLC SSD would last forever though


Cost of SSD drives are coming way down and fast. I just bought a new HP laptop and was able to upgrade from a 320gb hard drive to a 160gb SSD drive for only $100 extra.

I have seen several 256gb SSD drives for as little as $500 as well. I even saw an 80gb SSD drive for $149. I do remember when 80gb SSD drives well almost $500 as well. So just keep patient! 

TGC


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## dvr_dude (Aug 15, 2010)

TexasGrillChef said:


> ...
> FYI... just got of the phone with tech support for the drive. The number of writes that can be done to any one sector (Memory location) is 9 Trillion Trillion times. Which takes about 1 MILLION hours of constant writing to the drive to achieve.
> ...


MLC SSD's have a typical write endurance of 5K-10K cycles per block. There's a great deal of effort spent on "wear leveling" to ensure that blocks don't wear out early. The good thing is when they fail, you can still read the existing data, you just can't write anything new.

I'm not sure where the tech support guy came up with 9 Trillion Trillion cycles, but that's complete fiction, with no connection to reality.

Tom's hardware has an article with an interview with a Kingston representative that might shed some light: reviews/kingston-ssdnow-ssd,2550.html.


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## bilbo (Dec 7, 2004)

dvr_dude said:


> MLC SSD's have a typical write endurance of 5K-10K cycles per block. There's a great deal of effort spent on "wear leveling" to ensure that blocks don't wear out early. The good thing is when they fail, you can still read the existing data, you just can't write anything new.
> 
> I'm not sure where the tech support guy came up with 9 Trillion Trillion cycles, but that's complete fiction, with no connection to reality.
> 
> Tom's hardware has an article with an interview with a Kingston representative that might shed some light: reviews/kingston-ssdnow-ssd,2550.html.


The Tivo is not going to support TRIM without software (and probably hardware) modifications. It seems like you are going to be taking a 3rd Generation product (that is much improved and less expensive than the 1st and 2nd Generation products), but you won't be getting much better performance (specifically the expected useful life) than a 2nd generation product.

With two 24 hour buffers being written to continuously, if the programming is all in High Definition (which is almost always the case for me) you would be writing about 500GB per day to the drive (which is well more than 50GB per day that only 1% of users in Intel's study used more than). Two years ago Intel was saying their drives would last for five years if you wrote 100GB to them every day (but they only provided a 3-year warranty and they were only expecting 20GB written to them every day).

http://www.supertalent.com/datasheets/TRIM White Paper.pdf

http://www.tivo.com/linux/index.html

http://www.storagereview.com/demystifying_ssd_endurance

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/4


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## smbaker (May 24, 2003)

TexasGrillChef said:


> This upgrade did cost me $900 though. So I wouldn't recomend it for everybody.


Where did you get this for $900 ? I'm seeing prices of $1300+ on 512GB SSDs from places like newegg.


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## bilbo (Dec 7, 2004)

smbaker said:


> Where did you get this for $900 ? I'm seeing prices of $1300+ on 512GB SSDs from places like newegg.


smbaker,

There is someone on eBay that currently has about a half dozen of these available for $685 each (or best offer). He (videoman) already accepted one offer for $650.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Kingston-SSDNow...591?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c57ba757f


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## Floquet (Feb 12, 2010)

TexasGrillChef said:


> Suffice it to say that in terms of performace boost to the menus & other parts of the TiVo, I would have to estimate at least a 40 to 50% boost in perfermance and speed. The only noise now is coming from the fan of the unit!


TGC,

Have you noticed any improvements with file transfers, MRV, TivoToGo ...? How long would a 4GB or 8GB recording take to download? Can you stream 720P or 1080i recordings in real time 

Ciao,

Floquet.


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## cwerdna (Feb 22, 2001)

dvr_dude said:


> MLC SSD's have a typical write endurance of 5K-10K cycles per block. There's a great deal of effort spent on "wear leveling" to ensure that blocks don't wear out early. The good thing is when they fail, you can still read the existing data, you just can't write anything new.
> 
> I'm not sure where the tech support guy came up with 9 Trillion Trillion cycles, but that's complete fiction, with no connection to reality.


Yep. "9 trillion trillion" is complete fiction. Even insanely expensive SLC drives can only typically ensure 100K cycles per block. See http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/4.

1 million hour MTBF does NOT mean that drive will run for 1 million hours.


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## alansh (Jan 3, 2003)

I'm fairly certain the drive is not the bottleneck for TiVo, it's the CPU (as far as MRV, etc.). I really doubt a faster drive will result in any faster performance.

TiVo is unusual in that it's writing large amounts of data constantly. Your typical desktop drive usage is doing mostly reads.


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## TexasGrillChef (Sep 15, 2006)

smbaker said:


> Where did you get this for $900 ? I'm seeing prices of $1300+ on 512GB SSDs from places like newegg.


I have contacts that were able to get wholesale prices direct from the supplier. But since you asked this question and now that I have answered. There are a few places online that now have it for $900

TGC


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## TexasGrillChef (Sep 15, 2006)

Floquet said:


> TGC,
> 
> Have you noticed any improvements with file transfers, MRV, TivoToGo ...? How long would a 4GB or 8GB recording take to download? Can you stream 720P or 1080i recordings in real time
> 
> ...


I tried several different method of MRV to test speeds.

TiVo to TiVo -> of a 1hr HD original TiVo recording. Transfer from a TiVo without SSD to the TiVo with the SSD. No noticeable increase in transfer speed. The same show from the SSD TiVo to the non-SSD TiVo, took about 10 min less. ALMOST realtime transfer, but not quite.

PC to TiVo with SSD. About 10 min faster than the same video transfer from my PC to TiVo without SSD.

TGC


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## TexasGrillChef (Sep 15, 2006)

Update:

I have removed my SSD from the TiVo and installed it in a laptop.

Not because I had any issues with the SSD in my TiVo, Just I needed the additional speed and space on my notebook & did not want to invest in another drive.

I did replace with the 500gb Seagate momentus hybrid drive. It seems to be doing quite well in my TiVo, and the speed is still much better than other drives albeit not as good as the SSD drive.


I don't beleive that the performance boost that you get from a SSD drive is worth the high investment needed. At least at current prices.

TGC


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## jsknoll (Dec 27, 2011)

TexasGrillChef said:


> Update:
> 
> I did replace with the 500gb Seagate momentus hybrid drive. It seems to be doing quite well in my TiVo, and the speed is still much better than other drives albeit not as good as the SSD drive.
> 
> TGC


Any chance you could point me to a step-by-step for that upgrade? I've got the drive and I've got a dead Tivo.

Help?

~ JSK


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## teasip (Aug 24, 2002)

Silly question. I see folks putting smaller sized SSD's in laptops, etc. compared to what they had in originally. Don't folks miss the storage space or is there some form of more effective storage with the SSD over the HDD?


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## DougJohnson (Dec 12, 2006)

teasip said:


> Silly question. I see folks putting smaller sized SSD's in laptops, etc. compared to what they had in originally. Don't folks miss the storage space or is there some form of more effective storage with the SSD over the HDD?


Nope. A SSD GB is the same size as an HDD GB, just way faster.

I'm spoiled. I don't think I could ever go back to a HDD as the system disc. 20 second boot times and application startup so fast it pops your head back. -- Doug


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## astrohip (Jan 7, 2003)

Waaay faster. Both my personal laptop and my work PC have SSDs. It's the crack of hard drives.

Size is an issue though, at least at home (at work, I can offload lots to the network). With digipics and videos and music, the SSD in my new Thinkpad was rapidly filling. So I ordered an mSATA SSD for a 2nd hard drive. When I rec'd it, I actually thought there had been a mistake. It was a 128GB SSD, and if you cut a credit card in half, it still wasn't that big! Less than 1/4" thick, and maybe an inch square.


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## wesmills (Mar 8, 2006)

teasip said:


> Silly question. I see folks putting smaller sized SSD's in laptops, etc. compared to what they had in originally. Don't folks miss the storage space or is there some form of more effective storage with the SSD over the HDD?


Several people I know are putting SSDs in the main bay of their laptops to use as the boot device and for installing commonly-used applications. Most laptops have the ability to take a second storage device--either as a replacement for the optical drive or in a dedicated storage bay--so the upgrade means the "spinning disk" gets moved to that spot. Alternatively, external hard drives are cheap so I've seen people just use that for storage or just go "to the cloud" with things like pictures and music since those are the biggest storage hogs for folks.

(I'm extremely paranoid about a cloud provider just up and disappearing, so I keep everything in-house, so to speak.)


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

wesmills said:


> Several people I know are putting SSDs in the main bay of their laptops to use as the boot device and for installing commonly-used applications. Most laptops have the ability to take a second storage device--either as a replacement for the optical drive or in a dedicated storage bay--so the upgrade means the "spinning disk" gets moved to that spot. Alternatively, external hard drives are cheap so I've seen people just use that for storage or just go "to the cloud" with things like pictures and music since those are the biggest storage hogs for folks.
> 
> (I'm extremely paranoid about a cloud provider just up and disappearing, so I keep everything in-house, so to speak.)


I don't blame you for not trusting the cloud, but if you don't have off-site backup, you don't have backup.

Do a VPN to grandma's house or something.


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## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

Another thing to consider - for work purposes, an SSD is often "enough" because all the work files exist on the work servers, so a smaller drive doesn't impact too much.

For home use, well, a lot of people either have home fileservers with all their media on it (so they don't have to have copies of it everywhere and their phones and tablets can access it too), or a home desktop. Or they already carry around a portable hard drive with them anyhow, so it never strikes them to ditch it (probably because it's too damn convenient - need to give your friend beside you a file? Copy it to the hard disk, eject it, plug it in, and have them copy it off).

Me personally, I'd probably find 64GB SSDs limiting, and 128GB probably the sweet spot.


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## tiassa (Jul 2, 2008)

unitron said:


> I don't blame you for not trusting the cloud, but if you don't have off-site backup, you don't have backup.
> 
> Do a VPN to grandma's house or something.


Get 2 physical drives to back up on swap them back and forth -- keep one in your office (or if you are totally paranoid a Bank Safe deposit box), assuming your office is far enough away from your home.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

So, how much did this speed up the TivoHD boot time?

If you don't have your cable card paired, there are a few places where your tivo can be hung if you get the cable card auth page while in save to vcr mode.. (yeah I should get it repaired.. it isn't paired because I put the orig drive back in.)


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## mjh (Dec 19, 2002)

unitron said:


> I don't blame you for not trusting the cloud, but if you don't have off-site backup, you don't have backup.
> 
> Do a VPN to grandma's house or something.


There are programs that do this for you. I use crashplan. Allows me to backup to my friends house for free. And to their service for pretty cheap.



tiassa said:


> Get 2 physical drives to back up on swap them back and forth -- keep one in your office (or if you are totally paranoid a Bank Safe deposit box), assuming your office is far enough away from your home.


My backup plan is:
a) All PCs in the house back up to my server.
b) Linux server does LVM snapshots to enable cheap daily restores
c) LVM is back ended by RAID1 devices to survive HW failure
d) Linux server is backed up offsite via crashplan

So far I've had to exercise every single one of those contingencies.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

While an SSD is way faster than a standard hard drive in terms of surfing the menus and boot-up times, it offers no noticeable performance boost whatsoever in terms of recording and playback. It's absolute overkill for use in a Tivo. I don't know about the rest of you, but when I used my Tivos I tended to spend far more time watching recordings than surfing the menus. Spending $600 or more for a 512GB drive is ridiculous just to get through the menus quicker.

On another note, I use an SSD in both my primary PC and my HTPC for the OS install and miscellaneous apps. I use regular hard drives for data storage and recordings. Boot up is blazingly fast, but you also don't need a huge SSD for this purpose. A 64 -128 GB SSD should suffice for most users. The nice thing about SSDs is that you can get it almost completely full (i.e., 99% or better) and suffer no degradation in performance. A standard drive would start slowing to a crawl after getting past 80-90% capacity, especially if it was fragmented.


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## Cheezmo (Apr 26, 2004)

I wonder how a Hybrid SSD would fare. Frequently accessed things like the menus and guide data could be cached on the SSD giving you that performance boost, but be more cost effective for a larger drive. I think I just saw the Seagate Momentus XT 750Gb for $130 or so.


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## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

Yeah, if the hybrid technology is as good as they say it is, it would be great - the media can stay on the hard drive, the OS part can be on SSD and fast.

I know I've seen near-ssd performance on them (was surprised) so it can work. I'm considering getting that for one of my MCE PCs, but I don't know how well it'll work in that application.


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## steve614 (May 1, 2006)

I suspect that the Tivo is not "smart" enough to use a hybrid drive effectively. 
Not without user intervention, that is.


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

steve614 said:


> I suspect that the Tivo is not "smart" enough to use a hybrid drive effectively.
> Not without user intervention, that is.


honestly i dont know so that's why i ask- doesn't the drive have the smarts? I was under the impression that a hybrid drive had some sort of firmware/controller and it would notice what data is frequently accessed and move that to the SSD section and leave the rest on the platters?

But i'm not really sure if it would be able to do that with the way Tivo partitions the drive? Can a hybrid move partitions back and forth between the SSD and platters?


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## alansh (Jan 3, 2003)

My understanding is that older hybrid drives did need OS support (such as Windows ReadyDrive) but newer ones are smarter.

100% of the data does end up getting written to the physical drive. The SSD acts as a huge cache, and holds the most often accessed blocks from the drive. Writes can also be buffered in the SSD, getting written to the physical drive later. Since the SSD is non-volatile, it does not lose data if the power goes off. This is an advantage in laptops where the drive can stay spun down to save power.

Since most PCs do mostly reads, the caching algorithm will be tuned toward that. Since the TiVo is constantly writing gigabytes of data, it's possible the cache will end up flooded with the most recently written data rather than most often used.

As I said way upthread, I'm still not convinced that the TiVo is that I/O bound. It's possible that if it's using the swap partition a lot, that could hurt performance.


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

alansh said:


> ...
> As I said way upthread, I'm still not convinced that the TiVo is that I/O bound. It's possible that if it's using the swap partition a lot, that could hurt performance.


My current GUESS would be that the thing is still IO bound.

back in the day- there was the cachecard for the series 1 which basically behaved like something of a hybrid drive, but better if I recall. I think it was smart enough to JUST cache whatever part of the drive held the guide database so the all the UI things where on the cachecard and the OS and recordings where on the physical drive. The flaw though was that I dont think it was non-volatile and so changes to the database could get lost with a power blip.

The UI isnt vastly faster since those old days- if anything its slower by far when you factor in the much better hardware.

Heres the cachecard site:
http://www.9thtee.com/tivocachecard.htm

with this blurb:


> Caching - The Tivo database is large (512MB) and every user-interface operation goes back to hard drive to read from the database - the same hard drive that is already busy reading and writing multiple high bit-rate video streams. The CacheCARDTM caches the entire database in high speed SDRAM so all database reads can be fulfilled instantly, rather than joining the queue for access to the hard drive. Database writes go directly to the hard drive so the Tivo database is always protected and is up-to-date on the hard drive.
> 
> The result?
> A general speedup of the user-interface and halving the time of long operations such as re-arranging season passes.


For those who werent around in the day- the product was a little more than tacitly supported by TiVo- they were kind enough to preinstall the drivers for the cachecard in later S1 software updates IIRC.

Whats amazing to me is that the cache was as small as it was.

Seems like even today- TiVo could just add a couple gigs of memory to the motherboard and speed things up immensely if they engineered it as an onboard cache. Maybe make it 4 gigs and then cache not just drive IO but also the most frequently accessed web content. The UI would scream.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

MichaelK said:


> ...
> 
> Whats amazing to me is that the cache was as small as it was. ...


For the type of memory module that was used in the cache card I think 512MB was the largest capacity in which it came, and I'm sure the S1 TiVos couldn't use the ones newer than that.

If there were 1TB versions, they were probably obscenely expensive and there were probably only a very few (also very expensive) server motherboards which could use them.

Actually a lot of the computer motherboards that used that kind of module couldn't use any that were larger than 256MB.


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

unitron said:


> For the type of memory module that was used in the cache card I think 512MB was the largest capacity in which it came, and I'm sure the S1 TiVos couldn't use the ones newer than that.
> 
> If there were 1TB versions, they were probably obscenely expensive and there were probably only a very few (also very expensive) server motherboards which could use them.
> 
> Actually a lot of the computer motherboards that used that kind of module couldn't use any that were larger than 256MB.


Oh- I didnt mean to be complaining about cachecard-

Im saying its amazing to me that such a small amount (in Todays terms) was all that was needed to fit the database and speed things up.

And I understand TiVos decision to build the machines that way back then (I think they had only 64m or maybe 128 on the directive 1). My point was a small amount of memory in todays climate is all that Tivo apparently needs to include to speed things up a bunch. At least they could have built the elite and maybe XL units with an extra couple chips (likely just upsize whats there in the real world) and made a big difference.


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## alansh (Jan 3, 2003)

The original Series1 had just 16MB of RAM (32MB for the DirecTivo). This may have cause a lot of I/O if the database wouldn't fit in memory.

The Series2 had 32MB (64MB for the dual tuner models). The Series3 had 128MB, and the Premire has 512MB. As far as I know, nobody released a cache card for anything other than the Series1.


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## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

alansh said:


> My understanding is that older hybrid drives did need OS support (such as Windows ReadyDrive) but newer ones are smarter.


True, I have a PC with a 1GB SSD used as ReadyDrive. But it's a separate device that Windows sees as two drives, similar to ReadyBoost except it's built in rather than USB. In non-ReadyBoost aware OSes, you see two drives.

As for TiVo - it's all the little I/O that's the issue. Reading big chunks from the disk (i.e. playback) isn't an issue and hard drives are great at that. It's all the little reads and writes that happen. For example, doing database updates after a guide data download can make TiVo visibly more sluggish, or take hours as it reindexes. TiVo does prioritize media accesses over OS and database accesses, so you get stutter free video, but at the expense of possibly sluggish UI as TiVo ensures the media buffers don't underflow which can delay other I/O. Given the nature of the database accesses, the drive might cache the databases and parts of the OS, possibly speeding it up.


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## royfernandez (Apr 18, 2012)

TexasGrillChef said:


> SSD's produce only 10-20% of the heat of a normal HD because their isn't any mechanical friction heat created like their is from heads tossing back and forth and the spinning discs.
> 
> Not saying they don't get hot, just they produce alot less heat.
> 
> ...


I have a good heat sink, but the drive boils, maybe something is wrong with the drive


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## heatherprotz (Apr 18, 2012)

That's an awesome space. HD to add to it.


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

royfernandez said:


> I have a good heat sink, but the drive boils, maybe something is wrong with the drive


Failing hard drives do often draw more power and generate more heat. But what drive do you have a heat sink mounted on?


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## DocNo (Oct 10, 2001)

Worf said:


> The only real problem with the SSD is the TiVo is the worst possible load to put on it - it's constantly being written to 24/7 which they don't really like. There's a limited life cycle on them, so a constant write tends to prematurely wear it out.


Not if you have Thom's ninja hex editing skills and hack your partition tables to be on traditional rotating disk, but the Tivo OS, indexes and swap on the SSD.

Now THAT kind of a hack is something I would be willing to pay for! Or dig into the bowls of Linux partition table innards to figure out... Everything would happen on copies of my existing drives so it's pretty low risk to try it out - worst case scenario would be drives I'd have to use elsewhere and wasting some time.

Hmm..... sounds like a good skunworks project candidate...


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## DocNo (Oct 10, 2001)

bilbo said:


> The Tivo is not going to support TRIM without software (and probably hardware) modifications.


If you use a sandforce controller TRIM is irrelevant. They accomplish the same thing as TRIM through over-provisioning. The MacBook Pro I'm using right now has a sandforce based SSD that's almost a year old and just as fast as the day I put it in, despite Mac OSX not supporting TRIM on non-Apple hard drives.

I think the only practical way this would work for me is to go down Thom's path of putting all the MFS partitions on rotating disk, with everything else being on the SSD. It's an interesting proposition. 4TB drives coming out make this even more appealing...


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## DocNo (Oct 10, 2001)

alansh said:


> I'm fairly certain the drive is not the bottleneck for TiVo, it's the CPU (as far as MRV, etc.). I really doubt a faster drive will result in any faster performance.


Actually it's memory. Tivo is incredibly stingy with RAM and it causes the OS to page to disk CONSTANTLY.

On top of continually writing multiple video streams 

I've got a Tivo S1 with a cache card - best $100 or whatever it was I ever spent. I've looked off and on for transparent SATA caches that don't require OS drivers and are inline and self contained between the hard drive and motherboard. Similar in concept to external hard drive cases that have transparent RAID - to the computer they look as one drive, ideally to Tivo this would just look like a hard drive as well. All you need to do is get the majority of the database into the cache and the speed increase is dramatic...

I haven't looked in a while - maybe it's time to look again!


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## DocNo (Oct 10, 2001)

mr.unnatural said:


> While an SSD is way faster than a standard hard drive in terms of surfing the menus and boot-up times, it offers no noticeable performance boost whatsoever in terms of recording and playback. It's absolute overkill for use in a Tivo.


Maybe you have some alternate version of Tivo than I do, but every generation - S1, S2, The original OLED Series 3, Tivo HD and Premiere (I have and do own them all) started out awesome performance wise, and then with each OS update as they added more stuff and overrun the meager RAM built into the boxes, the interface lags more and more.

It's extremely infuriating to me. Perhaps your just more patient  But it annoys me enough I'm now very, very interested in Thom's strategy and potential solution.

The more I have sat here thinking about it and talking about Tivo software updates that could be fun with that approach. One would certainly hone their skills! I'm going to look a little harder for a transparent inline SATA Cache again.

Hmm.. I wonder if someone has an iSCSI to physical SATA adaptor. That would be an interesting solution! I have a great NAS box already that I can easily add some more cache to if need be.


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## DocNo (Oct 10, 2001)

Cheezmo said:


> I wonder how a Hybrid SSD would fare. Frequently accessed things like the menus and guide data could be cached on the SSD giving you that performance boost, but be more cost effective for a larger drive. I think I just saw the Seagate Momentus XT 750Gb for $130 or so.


I dunno - I tried Hybrid drives (Seagate Momentus) in both my Mac and Windows laptops and was underwhelmed. Then again laptop hard drives are generally much worse performers than their desktop counterparts. Now Tivo is not a normal PC - but I wonder how smart the cache in the drive is - will the steady recording of the live buffers keep it flushed out or will the drive's firmware be smart enough to favor the frequently accessed database files?


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## DocNo (Oct 10, 2001)

alansh said:


> As I said way upthread, I'm still not convinced that the TiVo is that I/O bound. It's possible that if it's using the swap partition a lot, that could hurt performance.


I have no reason to doubt the original poster of this thread, and based on my experience with the cachecard on Series 1 I can unequivocally state that Tivo - for the UI, anyway, is ABSOLUTELY I/O bound.

Hideously.

It's also pretty easy to deduce it from the upgrade pattern. When I go my first S1, it was great - then got slower with each successive software update. Then I got an S2 and I though "Wow, this is what I remember Tivo being", then it got slower yet again.

Then the S3 (OLED) was released and I pounced. Once again, performance was awesome and I was very happy - but sure enough, over time and system updates the performance once again went in the crapper.

I bought into the Premiere late in the game so I never did get to see if the earlier versions of it were any faster - at least with the HD menus off it's no worse than the S3 OLED 

Probably a $5 part for more RAM would make all the difference - the problem is that would probably add $25 or more to the retail price of each Tivo - so I kind of understand why they do it. I just wish there was an easier way for those of us who it bugs the crap of to address it later if we were willing to pay.

Hmm.. I wonder if they did anything different with the Elites with the four tuners. Probably not


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## DocNo (Oct 10, 2001)

MichaelK said:


> What's amazing to me is that the cache was as small as it was.


The efficiency was the driver. It guaranteed the files that needed to be in cache the most, and only those files, were in cache.

The fact that it was volatile really didn't matter. The amount of data, as you point out, is trivially small and Tivo's, by their very nature, are rarely powered off or reboot!



> Seems like even today- TiVo could just add a couple gigs of memory to the motherboard and speed things up immensely if they engineered it as an onboard cache. Maybe make it 4 gigs and then cache not just drive IO but also the most frequently accessed web content. The UI would scream.


It wouldn't even need to be a couple of gigs. CacheCard paved the way - a custom driver, a little bit of extra RAM and BOOM - a fantastic difference in performance due to a very specific optimization.

An optimization that's impractical to do on a general purpose computer but perfect for pre-made appliances like Tivo that are designed for a specific purpose. They obviously think the cost to do so isn't worth the effort, or the hiking of the retail price. And most people are so conditioned to accept crappy interface lag (or just not as OCD as I am - I admit it!) they would probably way prefer to not spend the extra $$ - never mind how much more enjoyable it makes the whole user experience.

Sigh.... the triumph of mediocrity...


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

alansh said:


> The original Series1 had just 16MB of RAM (32MB for the DirecTivo). This may have cause a lot of I/O if the database wouldn't fit in memory.
> 
> The Series2 had 32MB (64MB for the dual tuner models). The Series3 had 128MB, and the Premire has 512MB. As far as I know, nobody released a cache card for anything other than the Series1.


Nothign but the series 1 had the header on the motherboard so it would be impossible to build a card. Now you would need to build some sort of memory in line with the SATA drive- basically a hybrid drive.

might be true that the current boxes have more memory- but my GUESS would be it still "isn't enough"- there's probably more there for more tuners, or the like. But to me it's easy to watch the HDUI choke all over itslef and realize they could download the thumbnails and internet information for everything in the my shows list, everything suggestions, and most downloaded content and stuff that in a couple gigs on the motherboard and watch the thing scream. (I'm not saying it would be easy or evey possible with the current architecture but they could have thought about it when they moved to the S4/Flash UI and planned all around doing that)

Bottom line is TGC in the first post of this very thread said an SSD speeds things up ~40-50% which is similar to the cachecard results of years back- so it seems pretty clear there is still an IO bottleneck that memory could solve and TiVo made a decision to save a few bucks on each box at the cost of performance. We'll never know if tivo would have sold more by investing for more memory in each box- but I wish it were an option to try...


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## DocNo (Oct 10, 2001)

Ha! Found a transparent inline OS independent SSD powered SATA cache: http://vr-zone.com/articles/waremax-does-platform-and-os-independent-ssd-caching/12554.html

Not sure if it's still being sold anywhere just yet, but finally there is at least one that did exist. Now to see if I can locate one and test it out. Woot!

Edit - Google is quick! Now this thread and the link above are pretty much the only two english links related to this thing


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## MichaelK (Jan 10, 2002)

I'd love to experiment as long as it's "reasonable" in price.


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## DocNo (Oct 10, 2001)

MichaelK said:


> I'd love to experiment as long as it's "reasonable" in price.


Me to - I just can't find one to buy 

Seems like it would be a perfect fuss-free way to speed up the one aspect of Tivo that drives me batty - the UI!


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## ccfoodog (Feb 16, 2009)

It was mentioned that much of the media storage IO is undesirable to have on an SSD. I just wanted to point out that swap is in the same category. 

In reality, the better option is to eliminate swap. It is fine to run Linux systems (and modern Windows variants for that matter) w/o swap. The trick is you just need enough RAM to not need swap.

Typically the reason you add swap is because the load on the system is unpredictable. This is often because there are interactive user(s) on the system doing random things. With an appliance like the Tivo, this is not the case and this use is the poster child for running swapless.

Is it not possible to increase the RAM on these devices? What are the HW specs for the HD and Premier? How much swap is allocated? If you can add the amount of RAM that they allocate for swap and remove the swap entry in the fstab, you should be golden.

Memory is so cheap these days it would be a shame if it was not possible to run w/o swap due to memory restrictions.

-john


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

ccfoodog said:


> It was mentioned that much of the media storage IO is undesirable to have on an SSD. I just wanted to point out that swap is in the same category.
> 
> In reality, the better option is to eliminate swap. It is fine to run Linux systems (and modern Windows variants for that matter) w/o swap. The trick is you just need enough RAM to not need swap.
> 
> ...


Go back and re-read where you said "an appliance like the TiVo..."

It's not designed with hardware upgrades in mind the way a computer is.

So anything newer than an S1, adding more RAM probably ain't happenin'.


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## ccfoodog (Feb 16, 2009)

So I take it the memory isn't socketed. Bummer.

-john


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

ccfoodog said:


> So I take it the memory isn't socketed. Bummer.
> 
> -john


Sockets cost money.


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## jgantert (Jan 24, 2008)

WD just came out with a new 1TB Velociraptor drive. $302 on Amazon. 10000 rpm, 5yr warranty. That would probably speed up the Tivo nicely, if it could dissipate the heat enough.


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

jgantert said:


> WD just came out with a new 1TB Velociraptor drive. $302 on Amazon. 10000 rpm, 5yr warranty. That would probably speed up the Tivo nicely, if it could dissipate the heat enough.


I doubt that a 10000-rpm drive would speed up a TiVo in any way that would answer the complaints of sluggishness. And yes, heat and current draw could very well be a problem.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Yeah, you can buy as slow as a drive as you can get nowadays, and it's fast enough for a Tivo.


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## jgantert (Jan 24, 2008)

mattack said:


> Yeah, you can buy as slow as a drive as you can get nowadays, and it's fast enough for a Tivo.


Maybe, but wasn't the OPs claim that the SSDs extra speed made the Tivo faster? So shouldn't that apply to the faster 10000 rpm drives as well (although not as much of a speed up)?

BTW, I'm not seriously considering a 1TB Velociraptor drive, just discussing.


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## lrhorer (Aug 31, 2003)

ccfoodog said:


> It was mentioned that much of the media storage IO is undesirable to have on an SSD. I just wanted to point out that swap is in the same category.
> 
> In reality, the better option is to eliminate swap. It is fine to run Linux systems (and modern Windows variants for that matter) w/o swap. The trick is you just need enough RAM to not need swap.


I would not say it is "fine" to eliminate swap. If the kernel runs out of memory and there is no swap, the system crashes. While often one may essentially insure there is more than plenty of memory, things can happen that suddenly and unexpectedly cause the need for memory to soar. I know, I've had it happen on Linux systems on several occasions. In the case of the TiVo, a GSOD will cause the TiVo to write out all its memory into swap space and then attempt to repair the problem. If there is not enough swap space (like zero - swapping turned off), then the TiVo will enter into an infinite reboot loop.

Besides, the TiVo does not implement very much swap space - only 128M on S3 TiVos, nor does it use it much:


```
System Information Kernel Information

Version 2.4.20
Compile #1 Thu May 6 18:03:53 PDT 2010

Memory Information

Memory Statistics:
        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  130539520 94642176 35897344        0 11698176 51814400
Swap: 133881856 15560704 118321152
MemTotal:       127480 kB
MemFree:         35056 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:         11424 kB
Cached:          48852 kB
SwapCached:       1748 kB
PriActive            0 kB
Active:          46832 kB
Inactive:        22796 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:       127480 kB
LowFree:         35056 kB
SwapTotal:      130744 kB
SwapFree:       115548 kB

File System/Disk Information

Filesystem    Type    Size  Used  Avail  Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda7     ext2    248M  145M    90M     62%   /
/dev/hda9     ext2    248M   28M   207M     12%   /var
/dev/hda2     ext2    248M   79M   156M     34%   /var/hack
```
11M is just not a lot of swap.



ccfoodog said:


> Is it not possible to increase the RAM on these devices?


With a soldering iron, perhaps, but it won't gain the user very much, at all.



ccfoodog said:


> What are the HW specs for the HD and Premier? How much swap is allocated?


That is a TiVo HD shown above. The Premier may have increased swap space some, but I expect not much. The RAM has been increased to 512M.



ccfoodog said:


> If you can add the amount of RAM that they allocate for swap and remove the swap entry in the fstab, you should be golden.
> 
> Memory is so cheap these days it would be a shame if it was not possible to run w/o swap due to memory restrictions.


Not so much, really. As you can see above, 27% of real memory is still free, and this TiVo is running quite a few more applications in memory than a stock TiVo, including ftpd, TivoWebPlus, tserver, and ntp.

The biggest boost to responsiveness would come from caching the guide database, which is kept in the MFS file system, and can be up to 512M in size; considerably larger than the memory on the S3 / THD. Simply adding memoryto the motherboard won't automatically cache the database, however.


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## lrhorer (Aug 31, 2003)

jgantert said:


> Maybe, but wasn't the OPs claim that the SSDs extra speed made the Tivo faster? So shouldn't that apply to the faster 10000 rpm drives as well (although not as much of a speed up)?
> 
> BTW, I'm not seriously considering a 1TB Velociraptor drive, just discussing.


Not really, no. Some,yes, but not that much to make it worth writing home. First of all, even replacing the hard drive with an SSD does not have anything like an astounding effect. It's noticeable, but not incredible. Remember, the UI and crunching guide data are low priority processes, and much of the rest of what the TiVo has to do are real-time priority. It's very easy for the TiVo to be too busy to take much time to update the UI and guide calculation processes, no matter how fast the guide data can be shoveled into memory. Secondly, compared to the speed of even a rather slow SATA drive and one with only 8M of cache, the guide database is still somewhat small. Finally, the big advantage, such as it is, for the TiVo with an SSD drive is its tiny seek times. Seeks for an SSD can be 1/20 as long a 5400 RPM drive, while a 10K drive is only about twice as fast.


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## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

The main reason why an SSD is faster in general use is because the seek times are two orders of magnitude or more faster. A hard drive typically takes 7-8ms to do one seek, which limits you to around 150-odd I/O requests a second. The smaller the read or write, the lower the throughput. A SSD can do a seek in well under 100us which increases the I/O rate to 1000+, though even the slowest ones tend to go above 10,000.

For a computer that's reading and writing a bunch of small blocks (page file, little files and seeking), this jump is significant and makes the system snappier.

For TiVo, it's a bit more mixed - TiVo prioritizes video capture and playback, which involve long big reads on the hard drive (roughly 1MB sized chunks, roughly a second of video)=). The UI and other tasks are low-priority, so when they need to read or write the drive, their accesses are scheduled in-between. Of course, these things read lots of little chunks off the drive, so the head has to go flying around, and TiVo needs to schedule the video I/O first. So the UI and stuff slows down because the drive can only do so many accesses in-between video accesses.

The SSD helps because it really doesn't matter - the video I/O is completed quickly, and the rest of the UI I/O is pretty damn quick as well so it can be snappier as the random user I/O can be completed way faster so there's less waits in-between video I/O.

And no, even the the 10K drive cannot seek much faster - even the fastest drive that could do would probably take 5ms seek times, which limit you to 200 I/O a sec. Vs. 10,000+ for an SSD.

A TiVo would be an ideal situation though for a hybrid drive. If the drive is smart, it would cache all the user I/O in the mini-SSD, while the big I/O reads and writes remain uncached. (Given the reads and writes are to contiguous sectors, the algorithms should be smart enough to realize this as 1M chunk size is basically media speed - do this and you'll achieve the fastest reads and writes off the drive).

Windows checks for SSDs by doing a speed test - random 4K reads and writes. It then uses I think 20MB/sec throughput. A 5ms seek drive (200 I/O a second) doing 4K reads only gets you ... 800K/sec. 10,000 I/O per sec at 4K is 40,000K, or 40MB. To make 20MB, you would have a 5000 IOPS drive, which for an SSD is pretty slow (you're looking at "fake" SSDs using SD cards and CompactFlash cards to reach this class).

RPM speed is mostly meaningless as the total access time is dominated by the head seeking, rather than the waiting for the sector to pass below it. Nonetheless, they are great if you're wanting maximum throughput continually, like say, video editing. Here it's long big reads with little seeking where the benefit of an SSD is very minimal.


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## DougJohnson (Dec 12, 2006)

Worf said:


> RPM speed is mostly meaningless as the total access time is dominated by the head seeking, rather than the waiting for the sector to pass below it.


I think this understates the importance of rotational latency. A 10,000 rpm drive is going to have an average latency of 3ms. That is a pretty significant addition to a 5ms seek time. -- Doug


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## ciper (Nov 4, 2004)

Just stumbled across this thread. 
I've been using various models of the Momentus XT in multiple PCs with great results. I had an extra 750gb unit and planned to use it in my Tivo but cannot get it to boot.

I made a thread here http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=495978

Basically it shows the "Welcome! Powering up..." screen for a moment and then goes to solid grey, never to move again.

I can't figure out why it wont work since the drive appears to the OS as a standard 750gb Sata drive.


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