# TiVo Mega - coming soon !!



## HoustonMidtown (Jan 15, 2011)

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/personal/2014/09/08/mega-tivo-digital-video-recorder/15271057/


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## davezatz (Apr 18, 2002)

26,000 hours isn't enough... hopefully if I buy two, they do MRV or MRS. 










Official press release here:
http://investor.tivo.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=106292&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1964575&highlight=


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## NotNowChief (Mar 29, 2012)

http://www.cnet.com/products/tivo-mega/


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## StevesWeb (Dec 26, 2008)

It took me a while to be certain this was not a badly timed April fools story, but no, it seems real.

There are going to be people strongly tempted to do this themselves once the TiVo OS supports this kind of a volume.


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## Riverdome (May 12, 2005)

Having had multiple Tivo drives go bad over the years I would appreciate a RAID array so I could lose a drive and not lose any data. My current 2 TB of storage is never more than 40% full so I can't justify $5,000 but it sure would be fun.

I would love to see the CC installer's face when I open a rack and point to the CC slot


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## sushikitten (Jan 28, 2005)

I thought it was going to be an Onion article.


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## Riverdome (May 12, 2005)

24TB - can we finally get some user profiles or will this be one long list of *Now Playing* too? I can't even imagine having to scroll through something like that.


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## JWhites (May 15, 2013)

One of my coworkers joked that they are using the left over processor from the Premiere.


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## filovirus (Aug 22, 2013)

Somehow a single 6 tuner DVR doesn't seem sufficient for this behemoth. Comcast (at least in my area) only charges an extra 1.50 for a second CC in same device.


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## JWhites (May 15, 2013)

Too bad we cannot use this as an eSATA hard drive expander. I know Moxie allowed us to use up to 6TB. http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-301434U-Quadra-FireWire-Firewire/dp/B001GFG48A/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top


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## JWhites (May 15, 2013)

I personally like the case itself I wonder if they'll sell it separately.


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## Time_Lord (Jun 4, 2012)

I can't image TiVo is going to sell too many of these units, at least to the home user, then again there are some people with more money than brains. 

Looking at what some of the cable providers are offering with a "cloud based DVR" I think these units are going to somehow be aimed at the cable TV providers, wonder how copyright restrictions would work.

I hope its not too noisy when placed inside an entertainment cabinet, 10 drives and the fans to keep it all cool has to make one hell of a racket!
Just a thought...

-TL


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## LoadStar (Jul 24, 2001)

Time_Lord said:


> I hope its not too noisy when placed inside an entertainment cabinet, 10 drives and the fans to keep it all cool has to make one hell of a racket!


I wonder if there would even be AV hookups on this. Something tells me they expect to have this placed in a wiring closet, and Minis at all the TVs throughout the house.

The TiVo logo in the center should be replaced with a little AMOLED display. It still can show the TiVo guy most of the time, but then with buttons below it to cycle through status reports (tuners in use, drive status, temperature, etc.)


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## profet (Aug 27, 2004)

So TiVo hardware and software engineers are working on this niche product instead of the small community of Android users who want TiVo Stream. Makes sense.


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## SullyND (Dec 30, 2004)

profet said:


> So TiVo hardware and software engineers are working on this niche product instead of the small community of Android users who want TiVo Stream. Makes sense.


Yes, that's exactly right, it's not like the Android app is due out this month or anything


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## tomhorsley (Jul 22, 2010)

I see what looks like 10 disk slots. Whyt is it only 24TB - you can buy 6TB disks from newegg today, should be 60TB, shouldn't it?


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## mr_smits (Dec 17, 2009)

Time_Lord said:


> I can't image TiVo is going to sell too many of these units, at least to the home user, then again there are some people with more money than brains.
> 
> Looking at what some of the cable providers are offering with a "cloud based DVR" I think these units are going to somehow be aimed at the cable TV providers, wonder how copyright restrictions would work.
> 
> ...


I saw a news show a while back about a company in Houston that sells custom DVRs that record dozens of shows and hold dozens of terabytes of data from the shows. In addition to simply recording the shows, the software is fairly smart -- allowing search of text (closed captions) dates, times, etc. It is meant for shows like The Daily Show that rely on having these clips always available and ready to export and use.

I believe the cost was 25k and up.

I bet Tivo wants a piece of that action.


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## takeagabu (Oct 7, 2007)

The only situation in which I could imagine this being useful would need user profiles and maybe more tuners.


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## Phasers (May 29, 2008)

mr_smits said:


> I saw a news show a while back about a company in Houston that sells custom DVRs that record dozens of shows and hold dozens of terabytes of data from the shows. In addition to simply recording the shows, the software is fairly smart -- allowing search of text (closed captions) dates, times, etc. It is meant for shows like The Daily Show that rely on having these clips always available and ready to export and use.
> 
> I believe the cost was 25k and up.
> 
> I bet Tivo wants a piece of that action.


If they do, they are really under-pricing it. Expected pricing is "around $5,000" per the press release.


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## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

After careful consideration, I have concluded that this slightly exceeds my requirements.


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## bradleys (Oct 31, 2007)

My issue is that it only has 6 tuners, if this beast is really going to be a hub for a "Mega" implementation it needs 12 tuners (two cable cards)


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## TxDan (Aug 26, 2013)

Can you imagine what "My Shows" looks like when this thing is 25% full?


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## f0gax (Aug 8, 2002)

tomhorsley said:


> I see what looks like 10 disk slots. Whyt is it only 24TB - you can buy 6TB disks from newegg today, should be 60TB, shouldn't it?


If I had to guess it is because they are aiming this at a market where reliability trumps capacity (to an extent). You can get enterprise-class drives with 3 and 4 TB capacity. But 6TB, not so much.

If they're smart though, they'll build it so that it can be expanded on the fly. I managed a few NAS devices that allow for that. If you want to upgrade, you just pop in a new larger disk, wait for the system to rebuild the parity, and repeat until you've replaced all the drives.

Also, in RAID5 you "lose" one drive worth of capacity for parity - so it would be more like 54 TB in your scenario.


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## mr_smits (Dec 17, 2009)

Phasers said:


> If they do, they are really under-pricing it. Expected pricing is "around $5,000" per the press release.


I doubt any of the other features will be available for most users. The text search and ability to export for newscasts is important to a relatively small market.


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## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

I think it's reasonable there be some sort of high-end custom-install product to go along with those who are target customers of companies like Crestron. Though I think it having been more modular would've been an advantage to having a larger potential market -- separating the tuner device from storage, for instance. Though maybe inside that is what they did and this is just an initial product. I suspect, though, it's probably just a Roamio Pro inside and some fancy RAID-to-SATA sort of interface to it, and appropriate updates to software.

At the very least we need to see cooperative multi-unit scheduling next, and potentially some more flexibility in how a TiVo mini can interact with multiple TiVo devices (not having a mini myself I'm not sure what existing capabilities are there, but something to make it somewhat seamlessly be able to share a collection of TiVo units on a network would be what I mean).

Overall, though, I think it's nice to see TiVo address this market.


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## JWhites (May 15, 2013)

LoadStar said:


> I wonder if there would even be AV hookups on this. Something tells me they expect to have this placed in a wiring closet, and Minis at all the TVs throughout the house.
> 
> The TiVo logo in the center should be replaced with a little AMOLED display. It still can show the TiVo guy most of the time, but then with buttons below it to cycle through status reports (tuners in use, drive status, temperature, etc.)


Could this be TiVo's network DVR solution they mentioned? http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/07/tivo-network-dvr-prototype/ or could this work in place of the Dell servers for the ActiveVideo Roku solution? http://zatznotfunny.com/2013-06/is-activevideo-powering-tivos-cloud-initiative/

Regarding the display I think it's a great idea. Do you want something like this http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j...cter-DOT-Matrix-LCD-Module-With-20x2-Dots.jpg or something that can do graphics as well like this http://www.china-lcdmodule.com/upfiles/HG240641.jpg or this http://www.china-lcdmodule.com/upfiles/HG32024011.jpg Came across something like this which was pretty cool. http://usb.brando.com/ezsave-lockdock-usb-3-0-sata-hdd-dock_p02760c0057d015.html


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## Bierboy (Jun 12, 2004)

Rob Helmerichs said:


> After careful consideration, I have concluded that this _*slightly *_exceeds my requirements.


Define "slightly".....


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## Rob Helmerichs (Oct 17, 2000)

Well, I have an unmodded Premiere XL4 that almost entirely meets my requirements, so do the math...


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## JWhites (May 15, 2013)

My head hurts now from doing the math


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

filovirus said:


> Somehow a single 6 tuner DVR doesn't seem sufficient for this behemoth. Comcast (at least in my area) only charges an extra 1.50 for a second CC in same device.


It isn't. When I was reading the article I expected them to say it had twelve or eighteen tuners. But only six? That makes no sense.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

takeagabu said:


> The only situation in which I could imagine this being useful would need user profiles and maybe more tuners.





bradleys said:


> My issue is that it only has 6 tuners, if this beast is really going to be a hub for a "Mega" implementation it needs 12 tuners (two cable cards)


+1

I assume the reason they didn't include user profile folders and 12 tuners was because it would have required a lot of new software code that they don't have the resources to dedicate towards writing. Perhaps in a year or 2 they will come out with the "Mega Plus" with 12 tuners.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

You're supposed to b(u)y 2 if you want 12 tuners.


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## tenthplanet (Mar 5, 2004)

trip1eX said:


> You're supposed to by 2 if you want 12 tuners.


 That's the beauty of rack mount, buy as many as you need and plug em in.


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## generaltso (Nov 4, 2003)

aaronwt said:


> When I was reading the article I expected them to say it had twelve or eighteen tuners. But only six? That makes no sense.


Yeah, 6 tuners is disappointing since that's what the current Roamio Plus/Pro already has. So if you upgrade, all you're getting is lots of capacity for a whole lot of money. This thing needs 12 tuners for that kind of money. The kind of person who "needs" that kind of capacity, will also need more than 6 tuners. Heck, I have 6 things recording at once all the time on my Roamio.


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## JWhites (May 15, 2013)

bradleys said:


> My issue is that it only has 6 tuners, if this beast is really going to be a hub for a "Mega" implementation it needs 12 tuners (two cable cards)


With the amount of problems Roamio had with outdated cablecard firmware, that makes me nervous. Cisco has a cablecard call the PKM 908 the actually supports up to eight tuners per card. http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/video/remote-controls-keyboards/ol_28628_01.pdf but then the limitation could fall into the cable headend not supporting the cablecard due to non updated equipment, and I can't really say I know of any MSO using this model.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

JWhites said:


> With the amount of problems Roamio had with outdated cablecard firmware, that makes me nervous. Cisco has a cablecard call the PKM 908 the actually supports up to eight tuners per card. http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/video/remote-controls-keyboards/ol_28628_01.pdf but then the limitation could fall into the cable headend not supporting the cablecard due to non updated equipment, and I can't really say I know of any MSO using this model.


With 2 separate CableCards that shouldn't be a problem.


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## JWhites (May 15, 2013)

tarheelblue32 said:


> With 2 separate CableCards that shouldn't be a problem.


Unless you're in a service area where the cable cards aren't updated to support 6 tuners. I can't even tell you how much support problems a Roamio user has when it comes to Comcast. I had a technician out the other day who was really going on about how much Comcast does not teach their installers about how to navigate around TiVo and that they have to rely on the customer to access menus. Comcast only just recently started pushing out the necessary firmware updates to all of their customers a year after the Romeo was released.


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## NJ Webel (Dec 8, 2004)

No OTA = No Sale.


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## bmgoodman (Dec 20, 2000)

It's interesting that Infinty X1 DVR can now collaboratively schedule up to 3 devices, for a total of 15 tuners! I'm glad Tivo realized years ago that nobody would ever want that!


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## NSPhillips (May 31, 2007)

NJ Webel said:


> No OTA = No Sale.


How could you fill up that many hours with OTA shows?


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## tivohaydon (Mar 24, 2001)

I think this has a market. Built and supported by TiVo? That's a huge plus to many. There's no way I could recommend my Media Center PC with 20TB of space (RAID, so only 16TB is available) and a six tuner Ceton card to anyone but a computer hobbiest/geek.

Pluses over a Roamio or other solution:
It looks like has a nice case built to swap failed drives easily.
Engineered as an integrated solution by TiVo (lots of experience in this area!) vs DIY.
Supported by TiVo, again vs self support.
Huge capacity. You just have to experience it to appreciate it.
Works with TiVo Minis (I assume!) for a nice whole house solution.

I've found six tuners to be plenty. I have a system that has the same space and never wanted to add another six tuners. You'd have to have a large family with completely different viewing interests to require 12 tuners.

They really ought to have built lifetime service into the package price.

They also better have an improved organization system than they have now for that many recorded programs.


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## generaltso (Nov 4, 2003)

tivohaydon said:


> They really ought to have built lifetime service into the package price.


They did.


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## shrike4242 (Dec 1, 2006)

I can't imagine it would have been more than $100 to add in a second 6-tuner processor and a second CableCard slot. 

24TB of space and only six tuners seems like a small imbalance. I have three Roamio Pros and one Premiere XL4 and will likely have far more than six tuners going at the same time as soon as the new shows start to hit plus recording other existing season pass items at this time.

I wish that with the space that is even inside of the Roamio Plus/Pro chassis that RAID 1 would at least be an option for redundancy.


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## Thom (Jun 5, 2000)

This is idiotic. A better solution would be to add NAS compatibility to the TiVo software.

Netgear added TiVo-related software to their ReadyNAS Ultra line years ago, but were continually tripped up by the TiVo software not having a documented transfer spec for Netgear to code for, plus TiVo would rarely answer questions.

If TiVo would add a documented mechanism whereby their software could query an external network device for a list of shows to play back, and for saving encrypted shows to an external network device, the NAS vendors would add this feature to their NAS boxes. And this software update could be added to existing Roamios.

The fact is that this software capability mostly exists on all TiVos already as part of the multi-room viewing feature on TiVo boxes. All that's missing is the ability for a TiVo box to automatically save a show to an external network device, and to automatically integrate an external device listing of shows with its internal listing of shows.

If TiVo actually wants this Mega box to succeed, they need to reduce the price to about a $1000, and sell it with only one drive installed, allowing the customer to add more drives on their own dime, plus upgrade to larger drives down the road.

But why go to the trouble of this Mega box when a software update can make their existing boxes work with NAS boxes?


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## bradleys (Oct 31, 2007)

Thom said:


> This is idiotic. A better solution would be to add NAS compatibility to the TiVo software.
> 
> Netgear added TiVo-related software to their ReadyNAS Ultra line years ago, but were continually tripped up by the TiVo software not having a documented transfer spec for Netgear to code for, plus TiVo would rarely answer questions.
> 
> ...


TiVo wants to (In some cases required to) maintain a very tight control content, so they are not going to make this that simple.

This isn't directed at the casual user, this is designed for the custom installer. If it had 12 tuners, I would say this product is a home run... Unfortunately it cannot drive enough clients for the design of the system.


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## elborak (Jul 15, 2014)

Thom said:


> A better solution would be to add NAS compatibility to the TiVo software.


From my understanding, CableLabs would never certify such a capability.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

It's still a crazy amount of storage for only six tuners. Especially when you can offload most content to a pc that has unlimited storage anyway.


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## tivohaydon (Mar 24, 2001)

generaltso said:


> They did.


I misread that. Then I think this is pretty reasonable having gone through the expense of building something similar myself with only me to support it.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

elborak said:


> From my understanding, CableLabs would never certify such a capability.


They certified Windows Media Center which offered the functionality with Windows Home Server.


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## gweempose (Mar 23, 2003)

f0gax said:


> If they're smart though, they'll build it so that it can be expanded on the fly. I managed a few NAS devices that allow for that. If you want to upgrade, you just pop in a new larger disk, wait for the system to rebuild the parity, and repeat until you've replaced all the drives.


According to the press release, it will feature "Hot user-swappable drives, offering protection from data loss". This doesn't necessarily mean you will be able to easily expand the capacity, but it's certainly a possibility.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

gweempose said:


> According to the press release, it will feature "Hot user-swappable drives, offering protection from data loss". This doesn't necessarily mean you will be able to easily expand the capacity, but it's certainly a possibility.


It would make sense if the system shipped with no drives that you could upgrade. Hell for a device like this and no drives I might be tempted depending on the price. This way I could expand as needed. Depending on what RAID they are using you would need a minimum number of drives to start of course.


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## Balzer (Nov 12, 2006)

NJ Webel said:


> No OTA = No Sale.


Damnit, you beat me to this joke...


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## kturcotte (Dec 9, 2002)

Of course, it'll be obsolete in 3 years when 4k resolution hits. Of course, if they can afford this, they can probably afford the 4k Tivo Mega in a few years lol


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## JWhites (May 15, 2013)

kturcotte said:


> Of course, it'll be obsolete in 3 years when 4k resolution hits. Of course, if they can afford this, they can probably afford the 4k Tivo Mega in a few years lol


I think we should all chip in and get one, then each month ship it to a different forum member for the month.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

aaronwt said:


> It's still a crazy amount of storage for only six tuners. Especially when you can offload most content to a pc that has unlimited storage anyway.


 I don't see why this device having only 6 tuners is what makes the storage amount crazy. 

Yes you can offload storage to the pc but you still have to buy hard drives and have a pc to support all that. NOt something the average user wants to do. It still would cost quite alot of money to have a pc with 24 TB of Raid storage. Also it means not being able to quickly access recordings that are on your pc right?


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## series5orpremier (Jul 6, 2013)

But can it transform itself into a robot that shoots lasers?

No laser-shooting robot = No Sale


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## malba2366 (Aug 19, 2014)

$The $5000 price is a bit out of hand. I think they should have made a $1000-1500 option with lifetime service and with 3 3TB drives in a Raid 5 array. The other 7 slots could then be left open for users to upgrade on their own as they need. With the ready availability of streaming services such as HULU, HBO go etc there is very little need for that kind of recording capability.


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## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

malba2366 said:


> $The $5000 price is a bit out of hand. I think they should have made a $1000-1500 option with lifetime service and with 3 3TB drives in a Raid 5 array. The other 7 slots could then be left open for users to upgrade on their own as they need. With the ready availability of streaming services such as HULU, HBO go etc there is very little need for that kind of recording capability.


I suspect the price point is as much to give plenty of room for profit to the custom installers as it is to cover any higher-level development or support costs.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

malba2366 said:


> $The $5000 price is a bit out of hand. I think they should have made a $1000-1500 option with lifetime service and with 3 3TB drives in a Raid 5 array.
> 
> The other 7 slots could then be left open for users to upgrade on their own as they need. With the ready availability of streaming services such as HULU, HBO go etc there is very little need for that kind of recording capability.


The Roamio PRo is $1100 list with 1 3 TB Drive for comparison to your recommended dvr and pricepoint. They'd probably have to price it higher. I don't think they added $3500 to your prosed dvr's pricepoint just for 15tb of extra RAID storage.

Sure there is little need for this kind of recording capability. IT definitely isn't aimed at the mainstream market. It would have to be aimed a hi-end installs or those that really really really love their tv and hoarding it. That's also probably why its price is higher than you would think.

As for streaming, personally I too see even less reason to hoard recordings with all the streaming services, but at the same time I also like using my Roamio Plus more than using the streaming services because the Roamio is more responsive and has better picture quality.


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## Philmatic (Sep 17, 2003)

I'm guessing their PR department got the RAID levels mixed up:

RAID 5 = 27TB (10 x 3TB disks)
RAID 6 = *24TB* (10 x 3TB disks)

There were reports that only 6 drive slots are populated, but that would make absolutely no sense, since RAID doesn't do well with differently sized drives.

The good news is that you could conceivably swap out all the drives for 10 8TB drives, even with RAID 5, you're looking at 72TB of storage.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

Unless they are including the protection amount in the calculation and using 4TB drives.

With RAID 5 that would be 20TB with 4TB of protection in 6 slots.


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## Thom (Jun 5, 2000)

I'm curious whether they implemented a software RAID or a hardware RAID. I think a hardware RAID via a chip like the SPM394 would be easy to implement, as it would be a two drive Roamio, with each drive being a very large drive due to the hardware RAID (the SPM394 chip is seen as a single large sata hard drive. All RAID functions are invisible to the operating system.)

If it wasn't for the TiVo software's MFS file system limitations, I would have implemented an SPM394 on my Roamio already. At least the Mega will force TiVo to expand these limits.


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## Bytez (Sep 11, 2004)

I think it's more about bragging rights than anything else, can't imagine they'd sell a lot.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

gweempose said:


> According to the press release, it will feature "Hot user-swappable drives, offering protection from data loss". This doesn't necessarily mean you will be able to easily expand the capacity, but it's certainly a possibility.


Oh, awesome.. Seriously, then yes, let us buy this WITHOUT any drives in it. I'd probably pay $1K for it immediately, depending on exact features (RAID, etc..)


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## ej42137 (Feb 16, 2014)

mattack said:


> Oh, awesome.. Seriously, then yes, let us buy this WITHOUT any drives in it. I'd probably pay $1K for it immediately, depending on exact features (RAID, etc..)


Ten 3 TB HD cost about $1K retail these days. So would you pay $4K for this beast sans drives?


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## jmpage2 (Jan 21, 2004)

TiVo - releases 3TB Roamio Pro
TCF peanut gallery - pfftt it needs more storage how can I add another large external drive?

TiVo - releases TiVo Mega with 24tb of storage. 
TCF peanut gallery - pfftt not enough tuners, expensive

Meanwhile in the comments thread at engadget this device and TiVo proponents like us are getting mocked for using what they view as dinosaur tech, because they are using synbad and NAS to download everything for "free" and stream it to their crap tv.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

jmpage2 said:


> TiVo - releases 3TB Roamio Pro
> TCF peanut gallery - pfftt it needs more storage how can I add another large external drive?
> 
> TiVo - releases TiVo Mega with 24tb of storage.
> ...


You forgot the peanut gallery comments on the Roamio OTA! 

Really, talk about from one extreme to another. Did April Fools day get moved on TiVo's internal company calendar?


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

jmpage2 said:


> TiVo - releases 3TB Roamio Pro
> TCF peanut gallery - pfftt it needs more storage how can I add another large external drive?
> 
> TiVo - releases TiVo Mega with 24tb of storage.
> ...


Hey as a TCF peanut gallery I have been asking for the ability to connect my TiVo to my NAS for a long time now. It is one of the reasons I initially tried WMC since it had that function built in with Windows Home Server. Well that and they had the 4 tuners coming soon long before the rumors of the TiVo Elite.

I even proposed a similar setup at one point with varying amounts of hot swappable drive bays and expansion ports for additional tuner cards.

Of course now with the Roamio I wish you could do all of the above while also using the built in Stream functionality to change the size of the recordings while retaining most or all of the quality.


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## Time_Lord (Jun 4, 2012)

I wonder how long it'll take until somebody figures out how to incorporate the RAID subsystem into an off the shelf Roamio.

I guess the first thing to find out is if the RAID is software or hardware, if hardware which I suspect, it may just be as simple as dropping a pre-configured RAID array into (onto?) the Roamio.

The reason I suspect its a hardware RAID controller (and I have nothing to tell me either way) is that with a hardware RAID system TiVo wouldn't need to add multiple SATA interfaces to the existing Roamio, instead the RAID controller would simply pass a single SATA connection back to the TiVo, the only modifications to the software would be to allow for a much larger storage space (an possibly some RAID monitoring)

-TL


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## gweempose (Mar 23, 2003)

malba2366 said:


> With the ready availability of streaming services such as HULU, HBO go etc there is very little need for that kind of recording capability.


Precisely. Given the fact that everything is trending towards streaming and cloud storage, this product makes very little sense. It's like coming out with a top of the line horse drawn carriage right at the dawn of the automobile.


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## bradleys (Oct 31, 2007)

gweempose said:


> Precisely. Given the fact that everything is trending towards streaming and cloud storage, this product makes very little sense. It's like coming out with a top of the line horse drawn carriage right at the dawn of the automobile.


I agree, and that is the point. To simply focus on capacity makes no sense at all. Yes, if this was to be a central hub for a large installation - say 10 to 20 client Mini's, then the investment and capacity starts to have some business value.

But with just 6 tuners it fails at that use case. I don't know anyone that has ever asked for that much storage capacity - alone.

My Video library is moving to Ultraviolet, so even if I could archive to this thing I probably wouldn't.

Assume I am a 1 percenter and money is no object, why would I purchase this? I have TV's scattered throughout my large home and I need a distribution system - will this handle it?

Not any better than a TiVo Pro... What exactly is the use case for that much storage?


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

Time_Lord said:


> I wonder how long it'll take until somebody figures out how to incorporate the RAID subsystem into an off the shelf Roamio.
> 
> I guess the first thing to find out is if the RAID is software or hardware, if hardware which I suspect, it may just be as simple as dropping a pre-configured RAID array into (onto?) the Roamio.


I thought about that a while back, but I've never tried it. As I recall, some of the external drive enclosures from StarTech appear to implement hardware RAID. Could we just swap the internal and external SATA connections inside the Roamio, so that what would normally connect to the internal drive goes instead to the eSATA port? (I haven't looked inside lately.)

Ideally, the Roamio would accept the external hardware RAID as just a hard drive. Are hardware RAID controllers transparent enough for that to work? It would be interesting to try a RAID5 array using three 1TB drives (yielding a 2TB array?) to see if the Roamio would auto-format it just like a single drive. If that works, somebody could try to build a 4TB array, and after that things would get even more interesting.


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## Time_Lord (Jun 4, 2012)

L David Matheny said:


> Could we just swap the internal and external SATA connections inside the Roamio, so that what would normally connect to the internal drive goes instead to the eSATA port? (I haven't looked inside lately.)


Do a quick search on SATA port multipliers, a quick search yields a lot of 5 to 1 multipliers, didn't see any 10 to 1 but I'm sure they are available.

-TL


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## tomhorsley (Jul 22, 2010)

malba2366 said:


> With the ready availability of streaming services such as HULU, HBO go etc there is very little need for that kind of recording capability.


"Cloud" is a marketing word meaning "We can prevent you from skipping commercials". Give me my own recordings on my own storage any day .


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

tomhorsley said:


> "Cloud" is a marketing word meaning "We can prevent you from skipping commercials". Give me my own recordings on my own storage any day .


+1

Once you lose local storage on your own equipment, you lose control.

It truly amazes me how eager everyone seems to be to turn over all of their data to "the cloud" just because it might be slightly more convenient in certain situations. There is absolutely no good reason to believe that "the cloud" is in any way private, secure, or reliable in the long term. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theory nut here, but once private corporations (and the government, thanks NSA) have all your data stored on their cloud servers, then in a very real way they own a piece of who you are.


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

tomhorsley said:


> "Cloud" is a marketing word meaning "We can prevent you from skipping commercials". Give me my own recordings on my own storage any day .


Yes, no-commercial-skipping = no-sale. And no matter how fast and cheap Internet connections become, it's insane to shuffle huge video files around the "cloud" just because we can. Doesn't anybody care about efficiency anymore?


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

Exactly why I don't do any streaming except MRS since it works exactly the same as local recordings.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

bradleys said:


> What exactly is the use case for that much storage?


To not have to delete anything. This is coming from someone that has no problems deleting shows and movies I have watched (or shows I know I just know I will never get to anytime soon so why keep them) so this isn't for me.

But I read the posts in these forums. 
Quite a few are digital hoarders.

If you are keeping movies and seasons of tv shows you record then that will add up fairly quickly. If I didn't delete anything on my Tivo I would probably be at 3-4 tb and today is about six weeks after I bought a Roamio Plus.

If you want to keep seasons of shows and movies and maybe special events or sporting events it will add up over time.

This gives that person a huge easily accessible library of content.

As for other use cases, maybe professional sports could use it? To scout teams and players in pro and college ball?


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

trip1eX said:


> To not have to delete anything. This is coming from someone that has no problems deleting shows and movies I have watched so this isn't for me.


I delete everything after I watch it, but I also record a ton of stuff in case I want to watch it which is where the storage comes in handy. This summer for example I watched both seasons of Hannibal and started Castle which had been archived on my NAS. The other day I was watching some of the final episodes of Alpha.


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## bradleys (Oct 31, 2007)

innocentfreak said:


> I delete everything after I watch it, but I also record a ton of stuff in case I want to watch it which is where the storage comes in handy. This summer for example I watched both seasons of Hannibal and started Castle which had been archived on my NAS. The other day I was watching some of the final episodes of Alpha.


We can already get to 4 TB - even 8TB with external. My wife will tend to keep quite a bit of stuff, but really had a hard time filling my 2 TB Premiere.

This? That isn't a use case... Not a viable one anyway.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

bradleys said:


> We can already get to 4 TB - even 8TB with external. My wife will tend to keep quite a bit of stuff, but really had a hard time filling my 2 TB Premiere.
> 
> This? That isn't a use case... Not a viable one anyway.


My Roamio Pro sits at 98%-100% always.

It is actually easy if you record everything you think you might have an interest in watching some day. I have plenty of series even ones that have ended that I have yet to start. I was already setup for it since I had a 20TB WHS. Of course I needed more space so switched to Synology since WHS v1 didn't support newer and larger drives.

If I streamed, I could get away with deleting those shows after watching them on Netflix. I hate the trickplay of streaming though so I rely on my recordings.

Some people rip their movie collection to create a giant library. I rip my TV shows so I have my own massive VOD collection with 99% of it unwatched shows. My friends and family have made fun of me for it until they needed access and then immediately appreciated it and now use it daily.


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## bradleys (Oct 31, 2007)

innocentfreak said:


> Some people rip their movie collection to create a giant library. I rip my TV shows so I have my own massive VOD collection with 99% of it unwatched shows. My friends and family have made fun of me for it until they needed access and then immediately appreciated it and now use it daily.


I have always ripped my movie collection to a NAS as well, unfortunately TiVo really doesn't deal with that very well.

No MRS functionality and when you push it back onto the TiVo for storage you loose all the metadata. Not really what it is designed for.

I have been playing with Vudu and Ultraviolet and this seems more like the future state then a huge local storage array. You generally get a digital version with a BD purchase or can associate a copy for $2. I am looking forward to playing with the new TiVo Vudu app.

As for content stored on a local NAS, it can be streamed both internally and externally using PLEX (with the beta TiVo PLEX Client)

Huge storage arrays are just so 5 / 10 years ago.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

My issue is more the streaming trickplay isn't as fluid or accurate as a local copy. Until that happens I won't be someone who streams. 

NAS devices seem to be selling more than ever and as the cost of storage continues to drop more and more people seem to be picking them up. While large arrays might be going away, you are able to get the same amount of storage in smaller footprints. Even single external drives now are common in 3-4TB drives.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

Maybe only 9 of the slots are used for the RAID. 9 3TB disks in a RAID-5 configuration yields 24TB of data storage.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Seems like excess for excesses sake. 

Basically a Roamio Pro with more storage then anyone could ever possibly use. Maybe if it had more tuners and user profiles, but even then the storage seems excessive.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

lpwcomp said:


> Maybe only 9 of the slots are used for the RAID. 9 3TB disks in a RAID-5 configuration yields 24TB of data storage.


RAID-5 requires 3 drives right? So 9 makes sense.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

innocentfreak said:


> Hey as a TCF peanut gallery I have been asking for the ability to connect my TiVo to my NAS for a long time now.


Well, there was that _one_ NAS (by HP?) that did support Tivo.. didn't it basically auto-back-up your Tivo recordings?


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

L David Matheny said:


> I thought about that a while back, but I've never tried it. As I recall, some of the external drive enclosures from StarTech appear to implement hardware RAID. Could we just swap the internal and external SATA connections inside the Roamio, so that what would normally connect to the internal drive goes instead to the eSATA port? (I haven't looked inside lately.)


You obviously would need to format the RAID with the Tivo filesystem.. (But doesn't hardware RAID do the filesystem stuff itself? It's not just literally a bucket of bits, right?)

Plus, there's only 2 of them that take 4 drives, and do RAID.. (at least with 3.5" drives)
http://www.startech.com/HDD/Enclosures/?filter_NUMHARDDRIVE=4&filter_RAID_YN=Yes

Though those are still a couple hundred dollars cheaper than the ones I've seen the few times I've looked around at Amazon and other sites for similar things.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

gweempose said:


> Precisely. Given the fact that everything is trending towards streaming and cloud storage, this product makes very little sense. It's like coming out with a top of the line horse drawn carriage right at the dawn of the automobile.


*IF* everything is available COMMERCIAL FREE, I would tend to agree with you.

If not, then I don't.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

innocentfreak said:


> My Roamio Pro sits at 98%-100% always.


My Plus is pretty much that full all of the time too, and I record MOST stuff in SD.. though I'm moving more and more to HD.. So I'll probably plop a 3 or 4 TB drive in there soon-ish.

Lots of late night talk shows that I just haven't bothered to offload (to save musical guests).

Though thankfully, leaving Suggestions ON did end up being useful.. since I saw it hit 100%, but I did have suggestions left, so didn't freak out quite as much as I would have normally. (A HD hour seems to be around 1%.)


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

mattack said:


> Well, there was that _one_ NAS (by HP?) that did support Tivo.. didn't it basically auto-back-up your Tivo recordings?


It was just TiVo Desktop so you couldn't backup copy once.


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## jmpage2 (Jan 21, 2004)

mattack said:


> *IF* everything is available COMMERCIAL FREE, I would tend to agree with you.
> 
> If not, then I don't.


It is if you're willing to pirate your content and you don't mind crappy quality.


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## astrohip (Jan 7, 2003)

mattack said:


> (A HD hour seems to be around 1%.)


I realize you're talking Plus not Pro...

I've got around 50 movies, 40 GofT, 15 MofSex, and another 30-40 misc shows, all in HD, and I'm at 41% used. 200 hours would be a WAG. Last time I looked there were 400+ in the RD folder.

Stock Pro.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

innocentfreak said:


> It was just TiVo Desktop so you couldn't backup copy once.


I'm not exactly sure what you mean... it was running ON the NAS, automagically, without any separate PC turned on, right?


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

My thought on the RAID configuration was that there were 2 RAID 5 arrays, one on each side of the device with (5-1)x3TB drives for 12TB + 12TB = 24TB. There are a lot of consumer NAS devices with 4 or 5 slots so perhaps 5 drive RAID controllers are readily available and fairly cheap?


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

flar said:


> My thought on the RAID configuration was that there were 2 RAID 5 arrays, one on each side of the device with (5-1)x3TB drives for 12TB + 12TB = 24TB. There are a lot of consumer NAS devices with 4 or 5 slots so perhaps 5 drive RAID controllers are readily available and fairly cheap?


Yep. That works too, and is much more likely than my theory.

My question then would be: Is the difference in price/performance of a 10 drive controller vs. a 5 drive one enough to justify losing 3TB of data capacity?


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

mattack said:


> I'm not exactly sure what you mean... it was running ON the NAS, automagically, without any separate PC turned on, right?


Yes but it still had the same limitations of TD. You couldn't play directly from the NAS. Content had to be pulled back which resulted in loss of metadata. There were no origination options when the shows transferred.


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

lpwcomp said:


> Yep. That works too, and is much more likely than my theory.
> 
> My question then would be: Is the difference in price/performance of a 10 drive controller vs. a 5 drive one enough to justify losing 3TB of data capacity?


I'm not sure about pricing, but one of the complications with RAID 5 is that when running with a bad drive and you need the data that was stored on the bad drive then you have to read that same block from all of the drives and reverse engineer the contents of the bad drive. Perhaps they couldn't keep up with doing that process on 9 drives as easily as they could do it with 4 drives if they split the arrays?

Or they could be using RAID 5+spare, though I think the article would have mentioned that. With that scheme there would be 8 data drives + 1 parity(*) drive + 1 unused hot spare. When a drive went bad the hot spare would be immediately used to recover the RAID. Without a hot spare, when a drive goes out you run in "degraded" mode until someone replaces the bad drive and then you run while rebuilding the array which is also a form of "degraded" performance. With the hot spare you move right to rebuilding the array, saving the amount of time spent in a degraded performance mode.

My money would be on 2 RAID 5 arrays, though. A DVR has a fixed read/write performance need and so the degraded performance must be better than that fixed requirement and if it is, then it really doesn't matter how soon you get back to optimal performance (other than the fact that you have no redundancy until the drive is replaced) - and fewer drives per raid array improves your chances of remaining above that performance threshold.

Another thought to consider is that since the files on the DVR are much much larger than a "slice" of the array (i.e. the size of N-1 blocks), they probably simplify things by allocating whole slices at a time. Thus, they would always be reading all of the blocks across the entire slice and "degraded" mode simply means more calculations after the read. But that would still mean less work if they only have to do calculations on 4 blocks instead of 9 so the advantage of 2x5 arrays instead of 1x10 still holds.

(*) - Note that with RAID 5, typically there is no single drive devoted to parity. Each block number uses a different drive for parity so that the write counts on all drives stay fairly even.


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

Another point to consider is multiple drive failures.

With 1x10 RAID 5 then you can survive a single drive failure, but a second kills you if it happens before you replace the failed drive and the array rebuilds (how long does that take for an average owner to act?).

With 2x5 RAID 5 then you can survive a single drive failure, and you can survive a second drive failure if it is in the other array (around 50% chance). Even if you are unlucky, then if they keep shows segregated on the arrays then you'd only lose half of your shows if the second drive is in the same array as the first. Similar chances happen for 3 drives going out.

With 1x10 RAID 5+hot spare, 1 drive dies and you recover. 2 drives die and you lose, but there is a smaller time window that lasts only as long as it takes to rebuild the hot spare (compared to how long does it take an owner to see the drive warning and replace it?). 3 drives die and nothing can save you.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

It would be extremely rare to lose two drives at once. But three drives? Some outside influence would need to cause that. One drive is easy to lose though, just from user error.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

aaronwt said:


> It would be extremely rare to lose two drives at once. But three drives? Some outside influence would need to cause that. One drive is easy to lose though, just from user error.


It's my understanding, that the most likely failure cause for another drive, beyond the first to fail, is the extra load on all the other drives, necessary to rebuilt the one that failed, to a replacement, or a hot spare, drive.

It's also my understanding that if not for the added workload to rebuild, another drive failure was not necessarily "imminent", under the usual working load, but became so due to the change in workload.

I'll go out on a limb, and posit that there's really no way to know that one of the remaining drives would fail under the extra load. This is the reason why many say "RAID is not a backup system/solution". I'll make a WAG, that using drives rated for a much heavier workload, than you normally require, when not factoring rebuild load, could lessen, but not eliminate, the threat. That kind of throws the "inexpensive" drive component out of the "I" in RAID. I would think it would be wise to buy drives based on peak "normal" load, plus peak "rebuilding" load, plus room for more (not just "enough").

I'm only "book smart" on this. So, I don't claim to know everything, or know that what I think to be the best approach, actually is, or will even be enough.


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## tivohaydon (Mar 24, 2001)

aaronwt said:


> It would be extremely rare to lose two drives at once. But three drives? Some outside influence would need to cause that. One drive is easy to lose though, just from user error.


While it's rare to lose two drives at the same time have you ever stuck around and timed a RAID rebuild on a 4TB drive? It's not pretty. It takes a very very long time on a completely unloaded array! Totally conceivable to me to lose multiple drives while that's going on.

Could be RAID6. With that much capacity that's what I'd (and do) use.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

flar said:


> With 1x10 RAID 5 then you can survive a single drive failure, but a second kills you if it happens before you replace the failed drive and the array rebuilds (how long does that take for an average owner to act?).
> 
> With 2x5 RAID 5 then you can survive a single drive failure, and you can survive a second drive failure if it is in the other array (around 50% chance). Even if you are unlucky, then if they keep shows segregated on the arrays then you'd only lose half of your shows if the second drive is in the same array as the first. Similar chances happen for 3 drives going out.


Wait, current Tivos don't have multiple drives/partitions.. if you have a dual drive Tivo, you lose all recordings.. Are you claiming this Mega does essentially have two separate show stores?


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## GmanTiVo (Mar 9, 2003)

Riverdome said:


> 24TB - can we finally get some user profiles or will this be one long list of *Now Playing* too? I can't even imagine having to scroll through something like that.


+1 :up:

my 2 teen daughters & wife are driving me crazy and I am getting tired of waddding throught their crap . 
Yeah I know I can get another Roamio, just trying to avoid forking out $700

Gman
(Roamio Pro + 3 Minis)


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## flashedbios (Dec 7, 2012)

If this thing had more tuners, and tivo software supported "same channel tuner sharing across multiple minis", then I could see this being used in a small hotel environment or apartment environment, IE, the landlord buys this and a bunch of minis, puts this in the closet, gives the minis to tenants


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## flashedbios (Dec 7, 2012)

also, while rebuilding a drive in an array, tivo's drive contents are constantly changing. something else to cnsider


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

A quick calculation to show why this much space is completely unnecessary... The average bitrate of an HD station is somewhere between 12-15Mbps, which means this thing would hold anywhere from 3600-4500 hours of HD. So you'd need to record 10-12 hours of content every single day, and not delete any of it, to fill this up in a year. Even recording 24 hours a day on all 6 tuners it would take roughly a month to fill this up.


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

mattack said:


> Wait, current Tivos don't have multiple drives/partitions.. if you have a dual drive Tivo, you lose all recordings.. Are you claiming this Mega does essentially have two separate show stores?


I'm not claiming anything, just pointing out how that decision might affect the loss of data during a RAID failure. This is all speculation.


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

aaronwt said:


> It would be extremely rare to lose two drives at once. But three drives? Some outside influence would need to cause that. One drive is easy to lose though, just from user error.


If all drives are from the same batch then a loss of one drive often correlates with the loss of another, especially if there are 10 drives in play. Some NAS sites recommend getting drives from different batches to reduce the likelihood of a bad batch taking out your entire array.


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

flashedbios said:


> also, while rebuilding a drive in an array, tivo's drive contents are constantly changing. something else to cnsider


The science of RAID deals with that. The rebuild happens on working drives...


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

One reason for only dealing with 6 tuners would be the bandwidth needed to store the output of all 6 tuners (vs 12 or more). Generally with RAID, the write speeds can improve because you split the write requests across all drives, but when you lose a drive, you then have a lot more work to do and so performance drops back quite a bit - especially when you are also trying to rebuild the array when the drive gets replaced. They would have to be able to write 6 streams at once, during "drive failure" mode, while rebuilding the array and while also potentially reading a few streams for the many Minis that they will be pushing for a system like this.

With RAID 5, for each write operation, you have to read the old data block, the old parity block, modify the parity block to represent the new data block, then write the new data and parity blocks back. The reads and the writes each happen in parallel, though, but what used to be a simple single block write becomes a read and a write and it happens to 2 drives and you are reading and writing the same blocks which means you have to let the platters spin around before you can switch from the reading to the writing. If they are doing 5-drive RAID then they get 5x more ops/second, but 4x the operations (2 reads and 2 writes) so it doesn't end up much faster. If they did 1x10 RAID then the ratio would be better, but the degraded performance would be much worse.

(It may be better if they did what I conjectured earlier and allocated an entire stripe at a time, then each write operation simply becomes writing 4 data blocks and 1 parity block to all 5 drives simultaneously and no need to read anything back any more, but they transfer 4x the data at once. If standard RAID controllers are already good at noticing sequential writes to all blocks in a slice then they may get this for free.)


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## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

Dan203 said:


> A quick calculation to show why this much space is completely unnecessary... The average bitrate of an HD station is somewhere between 12-15Mbps, which means this thing would hold anywhere from 3600-4500 hours of HD. So you'd need to record 10-12 hours of content every single day, and not delete any of it, to fill this up in a year. Even recording 24 hours a day on all 6 tuners it would take roughly a month to fill this up.


Sometimes it's not about recording things one purposefully chooses, but in having useful, somewhat relevant suggestions be recorded and available for view anytime. More space beyond ones needs for purposefully chosen recording means more suggestions remain available to choose from at any given time.

There's also no need to seek to fill the available space purposefully, but to always have available space should you need it. Going on that 8 week around-the-world cruise? No worries. Your shows will be there to watch anytime.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

flar said:


> One reason for only dealing with 6 tuners would be the bandwidth needed to store the output of all 6 tuners (vs 12 or more). Generally with RAID, the write speeds can improve because you split the write requests across all drives, but when you lose a drive, you then have a lot more work to do and so performance drops back quite a bit - especially when you are also trying to rebuild the array when the drive gets replaced. They would have to be able to write 6 streams at once, during "drive failure" mode, while rebuilding the array and while also potentially reading a few streams for the many Minis that they will be pushing for a system like this.


The average bitrate for an HD show is 12-15Mbps. The tested write speed of a WD Green drive is about 100MBps, which means it has enough I/O bandwidth to simultaneously write over 50 HD streams. Now I'm sure the overhead of dealing with multiple streams would reduce that, as would dealing with reads for display and streaming, but supporting 12 streams is not really a stretch. Especially when you've got it RAIDed.

The 6 tuner limit is most likely a chipset limitation. I don't think the Broadcom chipset they use supports more then 6 tuners. And I'm not sure there is even one in existence that does.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

flar said:


> One reason for only dealing with 6 tuners would be the bandwidth needed to store the output of all 6 tuners (vs 12 or more). Generally with RAID, the write speeds can improve because you split the write requests across all drives, but when you lose a drive, you then have a lot more work to do and so performance drops back quite a bit - especially when you are also trying to rebuild the array when the drive gets replaced. They would have to be able to write 6 streams at once, during "drive failure" mode, while rebuilding the array and while also potentially reading a few streams for the many Minis that they will be pushing for a system like this.
> 
> With RAID 5, for each write operation, you have to read the old data block, the old parity block, modify the parity block to represent the new data block, then write the new data and parity blocks back. The reads and the writes each happen in parallel, though, but what used to be a simple single block write becomes a read and a write and it happens to 2 drives and you are reading and writing the same blocks which means you have to let the platters spin around before you can switch from the reading to the writing. If they are doing 5-drive RAID then they get 5x more ops/second, but 4x the operations (2 reads and 2 writes) so it doesn't end up much faster. If they did 1x10 RAID then the ratio would be better, but the degraded performance would be much worse.
> 
> (It may be better if they did what I conjectured earlier and allocated an entire stripe at a time, then each write operation simply becomes writing 4 data blocks and 1 parity block to all 5 drives simultaneously and no need to read anything back any more, but they transfer 4x the data at once. If standard RAID controllers are already good at noticing sequential writes to all blocks in a slice then they may get this for free.)


It still shouldn't be any problem. When I was testing my RAID5 setup I could still do multiple concurrent transfers to the RAID5 at a couple hundred mb/s when simulating a drive failure. While not near the normal 750mb/s transfer rate it gets, that would still be plenty of speed for six low bitrate broadcast streams.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Dan203 said:


> So you'd need to record 10-12 hours of content every single day,


Yes, I did snip your quote.. but I am pretty sure I record this much.. of course I delete stuff after I watch it, but things like late night talk shows I let pile up. Late night talk shows + news + Jeopardy + a bunch of prime time + World News Now.. I think that's easily that much per day.

(No, I don't WATCH all of the content of all of those.. but for the late night talk shows, I FF through them for the few funny bits/musicians.)


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

Dan203 said:


> The average bitrate for an HD show is 12-15Mbps. The tested write speed of a WD Green drive is about 100MBps, which means it has enough I/O bandwidth to simultaneously write over 50 HD streams. Now I'm sure the overhead of dealing with multiple streams would reduce that, as would dealing with reads for display and streaming, but supporting 12 streams is not really a stretch. Especially when you've got it RAIDed.
> 
> The 6 tuner limit is most likely a chipset limitation. I don't think the Broadcom chipset they use supports more then 6 tuners. And I'm not sure there is even one in existence that does.


Green drives, even the AV-GP, do max out at barely above 100MB/s sequential, (dipping as low as 50MB/s sequential on the inner tracks). Anything not sequential pushes performance off a cliff. But, they are both unsuitable for RAID use, anyway. WD support won't even try to help you, and will tell you to use the right drive for the purpose.

The WD Red NAS is a green 24x7x365 AV drive, suitable for RAID, and peaks at ~157-160MB/s outer tracks, with up to 120-150TB/yr workload rating, per drive.

The WD Purple is also green 24x7x365 AV, made for RAID, and use with motion activated surveillance/security cameras, with only a 60TB/yr workload rating, per drive, requiring that the drive have idle time (platters spinning, and minimal activity, as opposed to being saturated). Idle modes and idle time come in multiple flavors. Any time this drive has at least 20% unused workload, is counted as "idle time". WD requires that each drive always have at least 20% of this idle time for the Purple. If it's not getting it, at all times, you are supposed to add drives until you do. So, at least 20% of the time, the drive must also have at least 20% non-saturated workload, or it fails WD's criteria for it being the right drive for the job. This drive is almost entirely impractical, if a market for drives being able to handle a large number of motion-activated cameras, without losing a single frame, did not exist.

As usual, when I speak of "streams", I'm speaking of the streams as defined by the ATA AV Streaming feature standard, often with increased "streams" supported, by way of proprietary enhancements like SilkStream and AllFrame, which the host must support, or the extra number of streams cannot be used, and will fallback to the base standard.

Unless TiVo makes a major change, and starts using the ATA AV Streaming feature, the "streams" are limited entirely based on regular data mode read/write performance, and would rely on RAID striping alone, to increase it.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Have you tested any of the new 6TB green drives that have been released yet. Their rated transfer rates seem much higher than the lower platter count drives were.

I have no idea what the green drives are now. I used the WD green 500GB, 750GB, 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB drives many years ago and still have some in service. I've been using several of them in a RAID 5 setup for years now with great results. But I don't feel as good about the newer drives as I did with the many dozens of lower capacity green drives I used in the past. I do still use several dozen of the old WD 1.5TB and 2TB green drives in two of my unRAID setups. But those setups are not on 24/7. Sometimes I will go a week without turning on some of my unRAID setups.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

Dan203 said:


> A quick calculation to show why this much space is completely unnecessary... The average bitrate of an HD station is somewhere between 12-15Mbps, which means this thing would hold anywhere from 3600-4500 hours of HD. So you'd need to record 10-12 hours of content every single day, and not delete any of it, to fill this up in a year. Even recording 24 hours a day on all 6 tuners it would take roughly a month to fill this up.


10-12 hrs of content is only 1 movie per day per tuner.

For a household of 4 that is only 2.5-3 hrs of content per person per day.

And what's every been the point of filling up a 1 TB drive let alone a 3 TB drive? It's never been because someone is going to watch all that content. It's about collecting stuff just to say you have it and just in case you want to watch xyz.

But anyway imagine the suggestions this thing would store? Would it record 24/7 for a month if you kept suggestions on?


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I don't use suggestions. I record more stuff I want to watch then I can keep up with. And when I'm bored and don't want to watch anything I have recorded I watch Netflix, or Vudu, or HBOGo. I have zero use for Suggestions.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

aaronwt said:


> Have you tested any of the new 6TB green drives that have been released yet. Their rated transfer rates seem much higher than the lower platter count drives were.
> 
> I have no idea what the green drives are now. I used the WD green 500GB, 750GB, 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB drives many years ago and still have some in service. I've been using several of them in a RAID 5 setup for years now with great results. But I don't feel as good about the newer drives as I did with the many dozens of lower capacity green drives I used in the past. I do still use several dozen of the old WD 1.5TB and 2TB green drives in two of my unRAID setups. But those setups are not on 24/7. Sometimes I will go a week without turning on some of my unRAID setups.


No, my budget doesn't allow me the luxury. But, as you say, the charts I've seen (datasheets and reviews) show more platters increasing the rate, in increments. Some drives are increasing the platter areal density, and adding platters, to hit 6TB.

The difference between a 3TB and 4TB WD Green/Red drive is ~3MB/s. Beyond that, you have the same data I do. I have no itch to buy 6TB drives, and place so much trust in less, larger, drives. I waited for 4TB to be everywhere, before I went to 3TB. History seems to show that some drive capacities were inherently problematic, especially for the first to buy them. I like testing, but not enough to make a move past 4TB at this time.

Since the TiVo Mega speaks of 10x3TB drives, I was posting assuming it used 3TB drives. I probably should have made a mention that I was posting based on using 3TB drives.


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

Dan203 said:


> The average bitrate for an HD show is 12-15Mbps. The tested write speed of a WD Green drive is about 100MBps, which means it has enough I/O bandwidth to simultaneously write over 50 HD streams. Now I'm sure the overhead of dealing with multiple streams would reduce that, as would dealing with reads for display and streaming, but supporting 12 streams is not really a stretch. Especially when you've got it RAIDed.
> 
> The 6 tuner limit is most likely a chipset limitation. I don't think the Broadcom chipset they use supports more then 6 tuners. And I'm not sure there is even one in existence that does.


That's the sequential speed. The random read/write speeds are under 1MB/s according to anandtech. Given the need to read each block before writing in RAID 5, that factors into play as well especially because the head either has to hover over the track waiting for the write back to the same block, or seek away and seek back for the write.


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

aaronwt said:


> It still shouldn't be any problem. When I was testing my RAID5 setup I could still do multiple concurrent transfers to the RAID5 at a couple hundred mb/s when simulating a drive failure. While not near the normal 750mb/s transfer rate it gets, that would still be plenty of speed for six low bitrate broadcast streams.


Also factor in the need to support multiple simultaneous read streams as well.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

flar said:


> That's the sequential speed. The random read/write speeds are under 1MB/s according to anandtech. Given the need to read each block before writing in RAID 5, that factors into play as well especially because the head either has to hover over the track waiting for the write back to the same block, or seek away and seek back for the write.


It's nice to see somebody else familiar with the intimate details of these drives. I often rely heavily on AnandTech's articles, and have replicated the terrible performance losses (more like lack of any performance) when things are not sequential. It amazes me that anything less than a Red NAS keeps up with a 6 tuner TiVo, without having issues with the AV streams being written as plain data streams, and somehow can manage to read well enough to stream reliably to Minis around the house.



flar said:


> Also factor in the need to support multiple simultaneous read streams as well.


Very true. One thing the Red NAS will do is choke the reads to sustain the writes. I got rid of the last of my AV-GP drives before I could see if they had more balance. With Red NAS, writes take priority (and even exceed standalone read throughput), and reads just get what's left. I still have some standard greens around I can set up my homebrew "TiVo torture simulation tests" tests on. I wish I could get my hands on the software that WD gave Tom's Hardware Guide for testing drives in the ways WD designed them to excel. Even THG had a hard time keeping single drives within the 20%/20% range, without having to lower the stream bitrate, or throw less streams at them. This was even making use of WD's enhanced ATA AV Streaming.

As more people start using 6 tuner TiVos as their hubs, and Minis where full TiVos used to go, I wouldn't be surprised if any form of green drive would be struggling to keep up, as a single drive. I can't imagine (beyond the earlier points you made) that this would somehow not be improved by RAID, unless a drive has to be rebuilt, and the choice of drives installed didn't meet, or exceed, what TiVo designed around.


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## jmpage2 (Jan 21, 2004)

You really don't think TiVo tested all of this? Come on folks, they would have had this thing doing max records and streams while doing a drive rebuild to make sure it was up to snuff. At the price it is being sold at consumers will demand it be very near to perfect. It might even have a holdover rechargeable battery for the raid hardware controller so that it can complete any writes if power is interrupted.


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## kturcotte (Dec 9, 2002)

The 6 tuners may be a technological limit of the mechanical hard drive. How much bandwidth does a single channel take up? What about OTA? Can you imagine a mechanical hard drive trying to record 8 channels at once? And you know it would happen. Eventually, those hard drives would get full and somebody would be down to one hard drive and recording shows, and recording suggestions, and the hard drive just wouldn't be able to take it


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## tomhorsley (Jul 22, 2010)

jmpage2 said:


> You really don't think TiVo tested all of this?


Given the bugs we have seen in the software releases which were supposedly ready for everyone to use? Yes, I find it easy to believe TiVo hasn't tested something.


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## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

Dan203 said:


> I don't use suggestions. I record more stuff I want to watch then I can keep up with. And when I'm bored and don't want to watch anything I have recorded I watch Netflix, or Vudu, or HBOGo. I have zero use for Suggestions.


I have a lot of stuff recorded that I had wanted to watch, and as I was catching up discovered some of the stuff was losing significant favor with me such that I no longer really wanted to watch it anymore. On occasion I've gone into suggestions just to find something that appealed to me. Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video have different content as well as slightly different approaches to how to go browsing around. Suggestions are easier in some respects when you're not trying for something in particular. Suggestions are in all respects, "free" to have accessible. as well as the added advantage of not being subject to network connectivity issues, so they're watchable during outages, too.


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

jmpage2 said:


> You really don't think TiVo tested all of this? Come on folks, they would have had this thing doing max records and streams while doing a drive rebuild to make sure it was up to snuff. At the price it is being sold at consumers will demand it be very near to perfect. It might even have a holdover rechargeable battery for the raid hardware controller so that it can complete any writes if power is interrupted.


I don't think we're debating whether this is possible or not, we're trying to reverse engineer why they may have made some of the design decisions for the unit. We know that they are committing to 6 tuners and 10x3TB drives in some form of RAID 5 configuration and we're arm-chair speculating on the details that are left out between those facts...


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

Another thing to consider is that most NAS benchmarks measure average throughput, but an AV system is more concerned about latency. A RAID 5 configuration may allow for very fast writes overall, but if it just so happens that right this millisecond you need these 6 blocks written and those 3 blocks read and they all happen on the same drive, then you are governed by the performance of a single drive. The chances of that happening in random operations are so small that it gets averaged out in the benchmarks, but when you are watching a video stream you have a minimum allowed performance for your worst case. That's what needs to be driving the design.

We know a single drive Pro with a 3TB drive can keep up with 6 tuners and a couple of Minis. A RAID 5 may be able to keep up with more data on average, but it will likely still have the same worst case performance as the single drive setup - it will just have a much lower chance of encountering that specific case at any given time. But when it does happen that one single case makes or breaks your DVR...


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

kturcotte said:


> The 6 tuners may be a technological limit of the mechanical hard drive. How much bandwidth does a single channel take up? What about OTA? Can you imagine a mechanical hard drive trying to record 8 channels at once? And you know it would happen. Eventually, those hard drives would get full and somebody would be down to one hard drive and recording shows, and recording suggestions, and the hard drive just wouldn't be able to take it


?? a single hard drive in a TiVo right now has no problem with a dozen streams. Recording six tuners and playing back six all concurrently. All broadcast TV is low bandwidth. As reported by people with five Minis. So all six tuners are always recording and one is always being played back on the host TiVo. With five being streamed to the Minis which gives you twelve concurrent streams.

EDIT: And I just tried thirteen concurrent streams on my Roamio Pro. The six tuners recording, with one playing back on the host, four shows being streamed to my four Minis, one show streamed to a Roamio BAsic, and one show being streamed to a Premiere. So thirteen concurrent streams with the one hard drive and it's still working great.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

jmpage2 said:


> You really don't think TiVo tested all of this? Come on folks, they would have had this thing doing max records and streams while doing a drive rebuild to make sure it was up to snuff. At the price it is being sold at consumers will demand it be very near to perfect. It might even have a holdover rechargeable battery for the raid hardware controller so that it can complete any writes if power is interrupted.


The Mega does not come with drives (based on every piece of evidence I can find). The buyer has to provide/buy them, in addition to buying the Mega. I highly doubt TiVo tested drives *not* endorsed for use in RAID, for AV devices. I wave a pretty good amount of faith they tested WD and Seagate AV & RAID endorsed drives, at minimum. Beyond what they will likely endorse as suitable drives, which should also be endorsed as "the right drives for the job", by the drive mfg, I would think it's safe to say some drives will not work (or work well), and if TiVo is smart about this product, they'll use a whitelist for drives that can be used.

Any assumption that TiVo has tested every possible scenario, tends to be one that people regret. The Roamio (initially) couldn't even deal with "green" ethernet switches (even the market had been flooded by them, before release), and has had a multitude of HDMI/TV issues.

If TiVo couldn't even think to test using the ethernet switches many would be buying, and some already had been using, the optimists can take their chances, and the pessimists will probably have the best "luck". Assuming a product of this caliber would be tested to extremes makes sense, until the brand name, and track record, is factored in, IMO.


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## astrohip (Jan 7, 2003)

nooneuknow said:


> The Mega does not come with drives (based on every piece of evidence I can find). The buyer has to provide/buy them, in addition to buying the Mega.


This is from the TiVo web site:










I know very little about this kind of stuff. Does that mean it has the ability to handle that much storage, but doesn't actually come with it?


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

aaronwt said:


> ?? a single hard drive in a TiVo right now has no problem with a dozen streams. Recording six tuners and playing back six all concurrently. All broadcast TV is low bandwidth. As reported by people with five Minis. So all six tuners are always recording and one is always being played back on the host TiVo. With five being streamed to the Minis which gives you twelve concurrent streams.
> 
> EDIT: And I just tried thirteen concurrent streams on my Roamio Pro. The six tuners recording, with one playing back on the host, four shows being streamed to my four Minis, one show streamed to a Roamio BAsic, and one show being streamed to a Premiere. So thirteen concurrent streams with the one hard drive and it's still working great.


Try the same test, but don't just do it for the time it takes to verify it can be done. Better yet, make the same test an ongoing one, never giving it any breaks, then see how long it takes before issues crop up, and/or the drive gives-out.

Just because it will work, short term, leaves consistency, stability, reliability and longevity, completely out of the picture. Even with the added RAID, there are pros and cons. Now there will be the added complexity of how things hold up when a drive drops-out and forces a rebuild.

I can overclock a CPU I have to 4GHz, and beyond. But, I stop overclocking at 3GHz, so I can have consistency, stability, reliability and longevity.

What you posted is roughly the same as me changing my CPU settings to get 4GHz+, then changing back to 3GHz, but claiming I just proved 4GHz+ will work just fine. I know better than to push the limits of hardware to the extreme, without creating both real, and potential, consequences. But, not everybody knows better. Not everybody will get the same results. They should get closer to the same results, as most, and what is realistically expected, if they don't overclock, in the first place.

Two different technologies, yes. But the analogy seems fine as just an analogy.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

astrohip said:


> This is from the TiVo web site:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


In most cases, yes. It appears to be the same here, as well.

I can buy a rackmount home RAID NAS box, without drives, and provide my own, or I can buy the same thing, with drives included, but often can get a better price if I don't buy it with drives included.

TiVo might give the option to include drives, when the product actually hits the market, or some point afterward. Of course, the cost would be higher, if the price they are quoting is definitely driveless.

Some are so drive brand loyal, they will only buy a product, if it comes as a "bring your own drives" option, or comes with the drives they would pick, themselves.

Some don't care what drives are used, as long as they don't have to deal with choosing, buying, and installing them.

TiVo also might want to stay out of having to be responsible for drives that will fail. Their support is inadequate enough, IMO. Can we realistically expect a company that says "we don't support switches" (ethernet switches), to provide support for RAID drives? Would some of us even want them to?

*EDIT/ADD:* Many vendors sell driveless enclosures, NAS, & RAID boxes, stating things based on the maximum supported capability, which can lead to confusion, as it often sounds like they are saying it comes with the drives, when it doesn't (or is optional, at higher price).


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

nooneuknow,

_*Every*_ review that I have read of the Mega says it has 24TB of storage. _*None*_ say it can be *configured* for *up to* 24TB.

This one explicitly states that


> It costs $5,000, it has 24TB of storage in a RAID 5 array


There is no way that TiVo is selling this w/o drives installed. They are not selling a RAID, they are selling a TiVo. A TiVo is freakin' useless w/o drives.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

lpwcomp said:


> nooneuknow,
> 
> _*Every*_ review that I have read of the Mega says it has 24TB of storage. _*None*_ say it can be *configured* for *up to* 24TB.
> 
> ...


I've seen many review sites be provided with NAS & RAID boxes, with the drives, but the real end-users get a driveless box. Some review sites pull the drives to compare others, only to find that the box is optimized around the drives (conveniently) included with the one the mfg loaned them.

If every product that is useless without drives can't sell without including them, the market has a lot of devices that are useless, but somehow selling.

No matter what the review sites are being wined and dined with, I don't see anything illogical about drives not coming with a rack mount product, with bays that allow installing/changing drives, without opening the cover of the product.

This isn't the day of TiVos that required pre-imaged drives, lacking OS on flash. If things were still that way, I'd call a driveless Mega "useless".

Have any of the review sources claimed they bought the product? Can you or I buy what they reviewed, right now?

If all TiVo is doing is taking pre-orders, and not yet fulfilling orders, the terms are subject to change, TiVo could simply see lackluster demand, simply cancel all the pre-orders, and go back to the drawing board (and perhaps start-over).


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

On exactly what "evidence" are you basing your assumption that the TiVo Mega will be sold w/o disks?


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

Going by the title of this thread, the fact that I can't just buy one of these right now (making a pre-order isn't the same as buying), the tech/review sites are testing what TiVo loaned them, and parroting things allegedly said by TiVo (or TiVo press-releases, which don't have the best reputation for being fulfilled), this remains a "speculation thread", unless I missed something.

I always get myself into some form of endless fight, when I post in speculation-based threads. I don't want it, don't need it, and don't know why I always make the mistake of posting in such threads. It never goes well. I'll step back out and just wait for a real product to go on sale, with real specifics on what the price is, what comes with, what doesn't, and things move beyond pre-order fantasy.

I'll be around for discussion on hard drives themselves. But, otherwise I'm sidelining myself. I'm not big on fantasy, anyway. If I can't buy it, get an itemized invoice, with a solid shipping date, fantasy is all it is. TiVo has really outdone themselves. I'm surprised it isn't codenamed the "TiVo Segway".


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

flar said:


> I don't think we're debating whether this is possible or not, we're trying to reverse engineer why they may have made some of the design decisions for the unit. We know that they are committing to 6 tuners and 10x3TB drives in some form of RAID 5 configuration and we're arm-chair speculating on the details that are left out between those facts...


IMO, this post nicely sums almost all the debate brewing, just waiting to turn into a TCF bar fight.

flar obviously knows his RAID, and is (or seems to be) doing a great job of "reverse engineering" and "speculating on the details that are left out between the facts". He seems to know the drives as well as, or better than, I do, even more so, when used in the many possible RAID configurations.

Perhaps I should have made sure to never say anything close to stating it could be assumed the drives come separate, or even could be an option as such. I can't redact what's already posted and quoted, even though I don't feel a speculation thread should require me to.

Some see this as a TiVo, and find the thought of "drives not included" ridiculous, looking at it that way.

I look at this thing, and see it as RAID for TiVo (Plus NAS), conveniently in one rack mountable box, with the TiVo part being hard to focus on, given that I haven't seen or heard anything special about the TiVo at the core. It may be nothing more than a 6 tuner Roamio at the core, with all the RAID done by already existing, non-TiVo(ized) controllers, presenting one large volume to the TiVo core, which need only be made able to deal with a 24TB virtual/logical volume. Exactly how easy, or hard, that is, I have no idea.

People have speculated for a long time, that one might be able to "trick" a TiVo to use a RAID array, presenting itself like one large drive, if only TiVo's code wasn't (capacity) limited. Many who wanted to gather like-minds to try and do this got heckled, tarred, feathered, and run-out, for thinking anybody would want or need such a "ridiculous" amount of storage, or having the "ridiculous" idea anybody cared enough about recorded TV to want or need RAID.

Now that TiVo presents both, plus the rack mounting many have wished for, suddenly it's "a good idea". Sure, that makes sense. Never mind how many years people on this very forum were laughed at for asking if this very product could be made. It's not even an original idea.

I don't know whether TiVo is being smart, desperate, trying to evolve, planning ahead for clinging to life beyond their core patent upcoming expirations, or any combination of these things. Between the Roamio OTA, the Mini changes, and now this, I don't know what to think. Perhaps TiVo getting headlines, rather than being so cult-like, and thought of as a dinosaur by some, is worth whatever they spent to make headlines, and make sure the world knows TiVo is still an option, or make those who never heard of TiVo, aware of it.

So much for staying on the sidelines...


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## wkearney99 (Dec 5, 2003)

It was explained that it's a RAID50 array. That's a mirror of two RAID5 sets. Like this: 

Thus it's taking 30TB of raw capacity and providing 24TB of usable storage; the remainder being the overhead for parity required for maintaining access in the event of drive failure. There's still plenty of ways for failures to be problematic, even with parity. But block failures for media playback are far less of a problem than real data.

It'll be VERY interesting to learn how Tivo is going to handle the maintenance & support for units of this type. Advance drive replacement seems like it'd be a must.

I'm of the opinion that the folks likely to buy this aren't the enthusiasts here. This is perhaps better targeted at the higher end crowd using much more expensive automation systems (crestron, control4, etc). Where it'll probably do pretty well (given the much more limited size of that audience).

I'd very much like to see Tivo supporting actual network media storage, not just their own box. The market for NAS devices is pretty robust with plenty of options across all price/performance categories. This would deflect quite a lot of the enthusiast speculating and leave the Mega to comfortably sell to it's target audience.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

nooneuknow said:


> IMO, this post nicely sums almost all the debate brewing, just waiting to turn into a TCF bar fight..


Nonsense.



nooneuknow said:


> flar obviously knows his RAID, and is (or seems to be) doing a great job of "reverse engineering" and "speculating on the details that are left out between the facts". He seems to know the drives as well as, or better than, I do, even more so, when used in the many possible RAID configurations.
> 
> Perhaps I should have made sure to never say anything close to stating it could be assumed the drives come separate, or even could be an option as such. I can't redact what's already posted and quoted, even though I don't feel a speculation thread should require me to.
> 
> Some see this as a TiVo, and find the thought of "drives not included" ridiculous, looking at it that way..


Because that's what it is. A TiVo.



nooneuknow said:


> fI look at this thing, and see it as RAID for TiVo (Plus NAS), conveniently in one rack mountable box, with the TiVo part being hard to focus on, given that I haven't seen or heard anything special about the TiVo at the core. It may be nothing more than a 6 tuner Roamio at the core, with all the RAID done by already existing, non-TiVo(ized) controllers, presenting one large volume to the TiVo core, which need only be made able to deal with a 24TB virtual/logical volume. Exactly how easy, or hard, that is, I have no idea..


It makes absolutely no sense to view this as a "RAID for TiVo" since it cannot be attached to an existing TiVo. It is _*in fact*_ a TiVo which utilizes a RAID for storage rather than SATA or PATA drives(s) attached to a regular controller.



nooneuknow said:


> People have speculated for a long time, that one might be able to "trick" a TiVo to use a RAID array, presenting itself like one large drive, if only TiVo's code wasn't (capacity) limited. Many who wanted to gather like-minds to try and do this got heckled, tarred, feathered, and run-out, for thinking anybody would want or need such a "ridiculous" amount of storage, or having the "ridiculous" idea anybody cared enough about recorded TV to want or need RAID.
> 
> Now that TiVo presents both, plus the rack mounting many have wished for, suddenly it's "a good idea". Sure, that makes sense. Never mind how many years people on this very forum were laughed at for asking if this very product could be made. It's not even an original idea..


You are conflating two different things. Attaching a RAID to an existing TiVo is _*not*_ the same as creating a TiVo that uses a RAID for storage.



nooneuknow said:


> I don't know whether TiVo is being smart, desperate, trying to evolve, planning ahead for clinging to life beyond their core patent upcoming expirations, or any combination of these things. Between the Roamio OTA, the Mini changes, and now this, I don't know what to think. Perhaps TiVo getting headlines, rather than being so cult-like, and thought of as a dinosaur by some, is worth whatever they spent to make headlines, and make sure the world knows TiVo is still an option, or make those who never heard of TiVo, aware of it.
> 
> So much for staying on the sidelines...


You seem to want to justify your characterization of this thread as a "speculation thread" by engaging in speculation about TiVos motives. Other than you, the only speculation has been on how the disks are configured. And _*that*_ speculation is based on the available _*facts:*_ it has 10 drive bays and has a total of 24TB of data storage. So I ask you once again - On what "evidence" did you base your statement that it comes w/o disks?

Finally, regarding your posts that you now claim to be speculation and that should not have to be explicitly identified as such since this is a "speculation thread". The problem with that is that it makes every post you make anywhere subject to at least some doubt since there is no way to know whether or not it is speculation.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

nooneuknow said:


> Try the same test, but don't just do it for the time it takes to verify it can be done. Better yet, make the same test an ongoing one, never giving it any breaks, then see how long it takes before issues crop up, and/or the drive gives-out.
> 
> Just because it will work, short term, leaves consistency, stability, reliability and longevity, completely out of the picture. Even with the added RAID, there are pros and cons. Now there will be the added complexity of how things hold up when a drive drops-out and forces a rebuild.
> 
> ...


I only had the test going for around 1.5 hours. Since I had all the boxes streaming a two hour movie from the fastest bitrate channel reported by KMTTG. I saw no issues during that time and periodically checked all devices for ff/rew/pause etc. This is not something that would be happening on a consistent basis with most households. It could occur for periods every day but it wouldn't typically happen 24/7.

This is an Immensely better result than when I tried when the Roamio was first released or when the Mini was first released. Or even a couple of software versions ago. Back then there would have been issues with what I did. But everything was very stable during that 1.5 hours. Every box behaved the same way as when it is the only one being streamed to. I didn't expect that.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

lpwcomp said:


> Nonsense. <snip>


I asked you questions that you did not even answer. Yet, you demand me to answer your questions, and answer to your accusations.

Besides once again accusing me of "conflating" two different things, like I have some desire to conflate things, nefariously, this just smacks of how you handle those you don't agree with, when you are in a bad mood.

Have your way with what I post, if you really must do so. But, if I had to play by your rules, I'd have to provide proof that meets your criteria for credible, while your proof doesn't have to bear the same scrutiny and vetting.

There is no "winning" when playing by your rules. If I have to play by yours, then you have to play by mine, beginning with applying the standards, you demand of others, to yourself, and not responding to questions with questions.

Better yet, I just stop responding, any hope you find somebody else to take it out on. I see ZeoTivo is back. Have you given him a proper welcome back, yet? (rhetorical question, to be clear). Last spotted in the "Done with TiVo" thread.

I'd much rather read, and hopefully contribute to, non-combative contributions, like from wkearney99, than make a futile effort to escape your legendary wrath.

This thread has enough informational value (speculation inclusive) to me, that I'm going to be a part of it. Ignore list is an option, if I'm too conflational for you. Hell, I redacted the whole post, the last time you accused me of conflating, just to avoid a situation like this. I've never come out on top when you lock in on me, nor does anybody else. You're the Alpha, I submit. I'd say you are right about everything, if I truly meant it. I don't.


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

wkearney99 said:


> It was explained that it's a RAID50 array. That's a mirror of two RAID5 sets. ...


RAID50 a _stripe_ of two RAID5's, not a _mirror_.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

aaronwt said:


> I only had the test going for around 1.5 hours. Since I had all the boxes streaming a two hour movie from the fastest bitrate channel reported by KMTTG. I saw no issues during that time and periodically checked all devices for ff/rew/pause etc. This is not something that would be happening on a consistent basis with most households. It could occur for periods every day but it wouldn't typically happen 24/7.
> 
> This is an Immensely better result than when I tried when the Roamio was first released or when the Mini was first released. Or even a couple of software versions ago. Back then there would have been issues with what I did. But everything was very stable during that 1.5 hours. Every box behaved the same way as when it is the only one being streamed to. I didn't expect that.


I really don't have any argument with your results. I'm not surprised by the improvements, since TiVo had crippled things, then fixed it, and that was an update prior to this one.

But, how any of this relates to this thread, is kind of not-approximate, due to all the known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and speculation, where we are trying to fill in the gaps between what we think we know to be fact. I really need to know exactly what drives are included, or are considered "supported", or we could be comparing apples to antimatter.

I wonder if this might be someplace the new WD Red NAS Pro 7200RPM drives might shine, and address any concerns about performance during rebuilding. I had almost forgot about those hitting the market, a short while before even the slightest rumor of what is now being called the TiVo "Mega", came along. It seems like a perfect home for such drives.

As you can see, I need to pick my battles carefully (avoid them when possible), but don't want to be battered into silence, when there is no chance of friendly differences of opinion, or opposing speculation without bickering (and bickering is frowned upon by the mods).

I'm about ready to start a "research" thread. I'll call it "HDD Upgrade Info - Warning: contains technical data". I expect you to subscribe, if I do (or somebody beats me to it). I'll PM you the details, later.


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## lpwcomp (May 6, 2002)

nooneuknow said:


> I asked you questions that you did not even answer. Yet, you demand me to answer your questions, and answer to your accusations.


Your questions weren't relevant to the matter at hand. I made no demands. I based all of my conclusions/speculation on the publicly available information. I simply ask you on what information did you base your conclusions/speculation?



nooneuknow said:


> Besides once again accusing me of "conflating" two different things, like I have some desire to conflate things, nefariously, this just smacks of how you handle those you don't agree with, when you are in a bad mood.


No accusation, just an observation. I definitely do not subscribe any nefarious motivation. Stop treating every disagreement as a personal attack for which a counter attack is justified.



nooneuknow said:


> Have your way with what I post, if you really must do so. But, if I had to play by your rules, I'd have to provide proof that meets your criteria for credible, while your proof doesn't have to bear the same scrutiny and vetting.


Not my rules, the rules of a normal debate. You should be able to reference at least some data to support your conclusion.



nooneuknow said:


> Better yet, I just stop responding, any hope you find somebody else to take it out on. I see ZeoTivo is back. Have you given him a proper welcome back, yet? (rhetorical question, to be clear). Last spotted in the "Done with TiVo" thread.
> 
> I'd much rather read, and hopefully contribute to, non-combative contributions, like from wkearney99, than make a futile effort to escape your legendary wrath.
> 
> This thread has enough informational value (speculation inclusive) to me, that I'm going to be a part of it. Ignore list is an option, if I'm too conflational for you. Hell, I redacted the whole post, the last time you accused me of conflating, just to avoid a situation like this. I've never come out on top when you lock in on me, nor does anybody else. You're the Alpha, I submit. I'd say you are right about everything, if I truly meant it. I don't.


Once again, attach, attack, attack.


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## astrohip (Jan 7, 2003)

nooneuknow said:


> The Mega does not come with drives (*based on every piece of evidence I can find*). The buyer has to provide/buy them, in addition to buying the Mega.
> 
> 
> astrohip said:
> ...


In other words, you have absolutely -zero- evidence for your statement, even though you say you do.

Not one single statement from TiVo (or anyone, actually) that even remotely hints at this coming without drives.

It's fine to speculate. But to make the statement as matter-of-fact as you did serves no purpose other than to impugn by association all your statements.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

astrohip said:


> In other words, you have absolutely -zero- evidence for your statement, even though you say you do.
> 
> Not one single statement from TiVo (or anyone, actually) that even remotely hints at this coming without drives.
> 
> It's fine to speculate. But to make the statement as matter-of-fact as you did serves no purpose other than to impugn by association all your statements.


As already stated, I have made mistakes, and can't redact what's already posted and quoted. I already addressed that I'm not as certain of things, as I had thought I was. The latter part of my reply to you, which you substituted with "blah blah blah", had some redeeming value, and wouldn't go well with your reply.

What your "blah blah blah" quote substitution for my more context correct follow-up reply really said:


nooneuknow said:


> In most cases, yes. It appears to be the same here, as well.
> 
> I can buy a rackmount home RAID NAS box, without drives, and provide my own, or I can buy the same thing, with drives included, but often can get a better price if I don't buy it with drives included.
> 
> ...


Which was posted in response to this, from you:


astrohip said:


> This is from the TiVo web site:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


...which, of course was in response to another selective quote. Crafty way of quoting things, and altering context...

Note my change from talk of "evidence" (poor choice of word for internet & forum gossip), and how I make sure to use phrasing like "appears to be", and use of the word "if", in the proper context.

One person's evidence is another person's new attack vector. So, I fail to see the point in digging those needles out of their haystacks, so they can be picked apart and used against me. This isn't the only thread on the subject matter being discussed, and there are hundreds of "news" and blog posts on it, as well, if you count all the "sources" plagiarizing other sources.

That's all I have to say on the matter of my (possibly) incorrect posts. To be fair, this product is not yet truly on the market. While wrong to state facts not in evidence, as being facts or evidence, there's certainly plenty of potentially wrong info being circulated, yet to be proven one way, or the other. Even what some inside TiVo think they know, could change.


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## ac3243 (Sep 15, 2014)

Does it say anywhere they are sticking to SATA? There are faster options. I won't even get into how much performance can be realized with RAID controller s beyond the basics.


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## tivohaydon (Mar 24, 2001)

ac3243 said:


> Does it say anywhere they are sticking to SATA? There are faster options. I won't even get into how much performance can be realized with RAID controller s beyond the basics.


I don't see any reason why this won't be Linux based software RAID using SATA drives.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

For $5k it better come with drives otherwise that is a serious waste of money.

Heck, 3TB drives would not cost very much in Bulk. They better be part of the $5k price otherwise it would be a huge rip off. While I could see them not being fully populated, they should at least supply a decent number of them for the initial configuration.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

aaronwt said:


> For $5k it better come with drives otherwise that is a serious waste of money.
> 
> Heck, 3TB drives would not cost very much in Bulk. They better be part of the $5k price otherwise it would be a huge rip off. While I could see them not being fully populated, they should at least supply a decent number of them for the initial configuration.


Lets do some math, with WD drives, that all should work for the RAID (just should "work", not saying all are "ideal") All are 24x7x365 with RAID TLER/ERC to prevent drive dropouts and unnecessary rebuilding, plus are "AV" drives (although the Red NAS Pro ships with that feature set disabled, but available to turn on, if TiVo starts using it, thus requiring it, with this product).

Going by the "right now" Newegg prices:

(10) 3TB WD Red NAS = $1250
(10) 3TB WD Purple Surveillance = $1300
(10) 3TB WD Red NAS Pro 7200RPM = $1950

TiVo Mega $5000
- $1250 = $3750
- $1300 = $3700
- $1950 = $3050

$3050 to $3750 for 6 tuners, a rack mount chassis, and RAID, which could act as NAS for networked devices (but, may only be useable by TiVo sanctioned clients), w/TiVo Service included. Note that I didn't use the word "lifetime" in any way, since not paying for TiVo service doesn't mean it's PLS, just that it is "included". More on this would be good to know, as I'm sure some are assuming PLS and PLS terms, when we don't know if this can even be used on a standard service account. If it could be, then what about MSD pricing? Well, if you go there, it's a valid question, unless it's already been answered.

It still seems a bit steep, IMO, unless they are using Red NAS Pro 7200RPM drives, and including them. What seems to be a detail nobody has even touched on in this thread, is warranty (I see nothing on this, in any related threads), or more like a new maintenance or service plan to sell, that I could see some being able to do without, but not others. No incontrovertible proof that TiVo provides all 10 drives yet exists (that I am aware of, and see as such). Some translate the pre-order marketing as "if they say it has that capacity, it must come with the drives to provide it". I remain skeptical, even with the price breakdown I just did.

There are other threads, and even all of them combined, don't yield incontrovertible proof of much of anything, other than it has 6 tuners and RAID in rack mount chassis. Some only see the TiVo at the core as an integrated Roamio Plus/Pro. I'm hoping it's more than just that.

The RAID configuration seems to be something many have accepted to be of a type I will refrain from repeating (in case it turns out to be wrong).

Now, the next question I've seen posted about: What is powering & providing the RAID engine?
Is it hardware, with one RAID controller, or two raid controllers? (I'd guess one of these to be the case)
Is it software RAID? If so, where is the processing power coming from to power the software RAID?
Is it handled, at any level, other than large dynamic volume support, by the TiVo at the core, or has TiVo done a true "from the ground up" build of what is at the core?

TiVo seems to want to keep everybody guessing, and seems to have no issue with letting the product take on a life of it's own, with all the speculation...

Can anybody recall past TiVo products that created a buzz like this, but never made it to market, and/or put on display like this, but took almost long enough to be forgotten, then becoming available? I feel pretty certain they've done "proof of concept" products in the past, that never really went anywhere, or became a part of something else, but not what the original buzz was about. I'm curious about the insides of the "working" display models (as in, do the guts look "pretty" or "pretty kludged together"?).


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

wkearney99 said:


> It was explained that it's a RAID50 array. That's a mirror of two RAID5 sets.


Where was this explained? RAID50 might make sense, but the press release and all of the articles I've read have all said RAID5.


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

flar said:


> Where was this explained? RAID50 might make sense, but the press release and all of the articles I've read have all said RAID5.


Each half of a TiVo Mega could hold a 5-drive RAID5 array. If TiVo populates only one side, five 6TB drives would yield 24 TB of RAID5. Or they could populate both sides and mirror the two RAID5 arrays, still yielding 24 TB of whatever that might be called, but that would be too wasteful. Or they could stripe the two RAID5 arrays, yielding 48 TB of RAID50. Or they use ten 3TB drives, also yielding the advertised 24 TB as RAID50. And I should hope that TiVo would go first-class and implement the RAID in hardware, which should let them use pretty much the same software as a non-RAID Roamio.


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## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

L David Matheny said:


> Each half of a TiVo Mega could hold a 5-drive RAID5 array. If TiVo populates only one side, five 6TB drives would yield 24 TB of RAID5. Or they could populate both sides and mirror the two RAID5 arrays, still yielding 24 TB of whatever that might be called, but that would be too wasteful. Or they could stripe the two RAID5 arrays, yielding 48 TB of RAID50. Or they use ten 3TB drives, also yielding the advertised 24 TB as RAID50. And I should hope that TiVo would go first-class and implement the RAID in hardware, which should let them use pretty much the same software as a non-RAID Roamio.


I suspect storage is organized as two 12TB RAID5 arrays, not a single striped RAID50 array.


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

dswallow said:


> I suspect storage is organized as two 12TB RAID5 arrays, not a single striped RAID50 array.


Maybe. The space efficiency should be the same. But people may be betting on RAID50 because striping the two RAID5 arrays would be similar to what TiVo does when you attach an external drive. And like that arrangement, RAID50 should be faster than separate RAID5 arrays, unless maybe a failed drive is being rebuilt. But I'm absolutely no RAID expert.


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## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

L David Matheny said:


> Maybe. The space efficiency should be the same. But people may be betting on RAID50 because striping the two RAID5 arrays would be similar to what TiVo does when you attach an external drive. And like that arrangement, RAID50 should be faster than separate RAID5 arrays, unless maybe a failed drive is being rebuilt. But I'm absolutely no RAID expert.


(Presuming they do organize as two separate RAID5 arrays) They very likely spread the data across both RAID5 drives similar to how they work now with two physical drives, just not using the RAID50 method of striping blocks.

On the other hand, I'm not sure why they wouldn't use RAID6 with one 10-drive array which could work with two failed drives, rather than create two arrays each with only one drive that can fail before it is at risk.

And of course, on the third hand, maybe they're just saying "RAID5" like marketing drones do, and the underlying RAID or RAID-like implementation isn't really that specific method.


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## flar (Mar 18, 2003)

L David Matheny said:


> Each half of a TiVo Mega could hold a 5-drive RAID5 array. If TiVo populates only one side, five 6TB drives would yield 24 TB of RAID5. Or they could populate both sides and mirror the two RAID5 arrays, still yielding 24 TB of whatever that might be called, but that would be too wasteful. Or they could stripe the two RAID5 arrays, yielding 48 TB of RAID50. Or they use ten 3TB drives, also yielding the advertised 24 TB as RAID50. And I should hope that TiVo would go first-class and implement the RAID in hardware, which should let them use pretty much the same software as a non-RAID Roamio.


As I said, RAID50 might make sense, and I've done my own speculations all over this thread. But wkearney99 wrote "it was explained that ..." as if there had been some official announcement. I'm asking where people heard any authoritative reference to RAID50 as opposed to speculation from the shape of the box and the storage amounts. (Because every authoritative reference has been to RAID5...)


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## SullyND (Dec 30, 2004)

flar said:


> But wkearney99 wrote "it was explained that ..." as if there had been some official announcement.


I assumed he meant he was told that while he was at CEDIA.


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

dswallow said:


> (Presuming they do organize as two separate RAID5 arrays) They very likely spread the data across both RAID5 drives similar to how they work now with two physical drives, just not using the RAID50 method of striping blocks.


Good point. The simplest software move for TiVo would be to just handle one RAID5 array like a Roamio internal drive and the other one like an external drive, spreading recordings across the two however they do it now.



dswallow said:


> On the other hand, I'm not sure why they wouldn't use RAID6 with one 10-drive array which could work with two failed drives, rather than create two arrays each with only one drive that can fail before it is at risk.


RAID6 does sound like the high-end solution. But since TiVo sometimes seems reluctant to pay for high-end hardware, they might resist using wickedly complex RAID6 controllers, which surely must be pricey hardware. OTOH, the TiVo Mega is a price-is-no-object product, and the prices being mentioned should surely cover a RAID6 controller.


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## telemark (Nov 12, 2013)

We know it's not an AV-GP because that drive could not handle RAID environments.



Dan203 said:


> The 6 tuner limit is most likely a chipset limitation. I don't think the Broadcom chipset they use supports more then 6 tuners. And I'm not sure there is even one in existence that does.


Take a look at Broadcom "Full Band Capture". Those are some new chips that will do 8-way QAM decoding, which would make the limitation the CableCard at 6.
(And no limit whenever using Clear-QAM)



tivohaydon said:


> I don't see any reason why this won't be Linux based software RAID using SATA drives.


I considered that but concluded the Broadcom-MIPS chips typically included with other Tivo's are not peformant for this so it should be done with a Hardware RAID instead.

To add more speculation to this thread, I predict this will be targeted as NAS. So the tuner imbalance is countered by the other Tivo's on the network.


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