# Cheap Hard Disks



## terryeden (Nov 2, 2002)

SVP (who I've used before and are very reliable) have cheap high capacity IDE drives if anyone is planning an upgrade.

http://svp.co.uk/products-solo.php?pid=1708

Their 320GB is only £66.79 
And their 500GB is only £116.58

No connection other than a satisfied customer.

Obviously, they don't come with the TiVo stuff on them like Blindlemon, healydave and the other regulars - but it's a good price if you've got upgraditis.

Terry


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Hitachi drives are not renowned for reliability, and the 500gb was very hot when reviewed. 

However, I'll be interested to hear how you get on with them as they are indeed pretty cheap


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## terryeden (Nov 2, 2002)

My 250GB drive is less than 2/3rds full... The GAF would be fairly low on cracking open the TiVo again!


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Ahh well, I guess we'll have to wait for somebody else to volunteer their TiVo for HItachi testing...


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## CarlWalters (Oct 17, 2001)

terryeden said:


> My 250GB drive is less than 2/3rds full... The GAF would be fairly low on cracking open the TiVo again!


what's a GAF - apart from being a TLA of course ?


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## aerialplug (Oct 20, 2000)

FWIW, I've been using a Hitachi Desk Star (128MB) since January 2005 without any problems.


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## Nebulous (Nov 28, 2005)

CarlWalters said:


> what's a GAF - apart from being a TLA of course ?


sanderton was talking about WAF the other day. Turned out to be:

"Wife Acceptance Factor"

So.. my guess would be:

"Girlfriend Acceptance Factor"


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## timjon (Dec 23, 2001)

Just another vote for SVP - they're a fantastic company to deal with. I bought a DVD-RW drive from them a couple of years back, which wouldn't write reliably. Instead of the usual "send it back, we'll test it, then replace it" procedure, they actually shipped out a replacement by courier, and just told me to give the duff drive to the courier for him to return. 

They have a great reputation online, so this isn't an isolated case. I'd strongly recommend them.

Cheers,

Tim.


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## mognuts (Jul 17, 2002)

I use SVP all the time for blank disks etc and can confirm that they are a very good company to deal with. I also have a 2 x 500Gb TiVo using Hitachi drives. They run hot to the touch but only raise the temperature of the TiVo itself about 1C higher than it ran with the single 40Gb Maxtor that it shipped with. They seem reliable as far as I can tell (been in about a year), without any obvious problems stuttering, random reboots etc. They are slightly noisier than the 2 x 400Gb Hitachi drives that I had before, but not enough to worry about.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

mognuts said:


> They run hot to the touch but only raise the temperature of the TiVo itself about 1C higher than it ran with the single 40Gb Maxtor that it shipped with.


Interesting as my Tivo with 2 x 250Gb Samsung HA250JC runs at a minimum stable System Information temperature of approximately 36C in the winter when the living room temp does not exceed 21C (although on the worst day this summer System Information reported 46C)

However when it only had 30Gb + 15Gb original Quantums it used to run at only 27C stable minimum temp in winter living room stable temp of 21C or so.

What actual temps does your Tivo report running the two Hitachi 500Gbs as a stable minimum level and what does it get up to on the worst summer inferno days for temps?

Presumably you run in Mode 0? How many hours recording does this give you? Around 280 hours? Assume you also have a Cachecard and 512MB RAM? Presumably Now Playing still runs fast in this config as my experience is that Now Playing starts to slow down badly when there are over 400 programs in the Now Playing list. My average recording length is around 1 hour but then I tend to have a lot of 3 hour episodes of Formula 1 Racing on the disk to push up the average program length.

Also wasn't the 2x400Gb to 2x500Gb upgrade path a messy or difficult one to get to work? I think Blindlemon has said 2x750Gb Seagate drives in the Tivo is not feasible due to the power consumption requirements of these hard drives? That would in theory give you 525 hours at Best which would work but would start to give you slow menu operations in Now Playing and when Deleting etc. Playback would still be find as would use through Tivoweb.


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## Paperface (Sep 14, 2005)

Got one of these on the way for my Tivo.

Shall let you know how it goes.

Dave


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## Benedict (Jun 8, 2002)

aerialplug said:


> FWIW, I've been using a Hitachi Desk Star (128MB) since January 2005 without any problems.


....and I've got a 123MB Hitachi DeskStar that has been in a TiVo since September 2003 with no problems.


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## The Bear (Sep 19, 2006)

SVP are also doing another 99p Shipping Weekend this weekend for orders over £30.

link

Voucher code is *svp99uk*


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## iankb (Oct 9, 2000)

I think that the IBM drives, upon which the Hitachi drives were based, had a bad reputation because the heads would often stick in the withdrawn position. I assume that the problem was resolved many years ago and, in the TiVo, the drives are never off long enough for that problem to become an issue. I ran a couple for many years without any issues.

I used to look at StorageReview.com for performance and reliability information. You probably still need to register (it's free) and supply details (e.g. make, model, age, current status) of at least one of your drives to view the data.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

I see that Samsung now have a 400Gb 3.5" IDE drive out although its a 7200rpm effort.

Have heard nothing from Blindlemon on here as to the reliability and quietness of those drives or whether or not they draw too much power like the latest 500Gb and 750Gb Seagates seem to.

Whether I ever upgraded further or not would depend on whether there is a fairly painless way to expand from 2 x 250 Gbs to 2 x 400 Gbs with all the hacks and recordings in place or if the only satisfactory route is to start with a clean image copy of 2.5.5 and no recordings and then reinstall my Season Passes and Thumbs from the Backup I have plus then reinstall all the hacks one by one. If I have to reinstall everything from scratch I don't know if I could be bothered with all the hassle.

Of course if one of my drives fails then that's different. At the moment they are 16 months old so who knows if they will last me only another 6 months or another 2 or 3 years.

However I am thinking of getting one of these Netgear mirrored disk storage units to keep my Notebook backed up on to so I could put the 2 x 250Gb disks in that if I went to 2 x 500Gb on the Tivo.


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## TIVO_YORK99 (Feb 14, 2001)

Benedict said:


> ....and I've got a 123MB Hitachi DeskStar that has been in a TiVo since September 2003 with no problems.


You wouldn't be able to store many programs on that!


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## 6022tivo (Oct 29, 2002)

iankb said:


> I think that the IBM drives, upon which the Hitachi drives were based, had a bad reputation because the heads would often stick in the withdrawn position. I assume that the problem was resolved many years ago and, in the TiVo, the drives are never off long enough for that problem to become an issue. I ran a couple for many years without any issues.
> 
> I used to look at StorageReview.com for performance and reliability information. You probably still need to register (it's free) and supply details (e.g. make, model, age, current status) of at least one of your drives to view the data.


I think when they were IBM, the deskstars had the nickname Deathstars. I had quite a few fail with the heads stuck. I had upgraded many a tivo with the 123GB ish Hitachi which apprently did have a better firmware although they where the same design as the IBM, as IBM sold out the operation to Hitachi.

I still have a tivo with a 2003ish 120gb Hitachi and it is fine, the bearing are sounding louder than I remember, I did go for the samsung 120gb which was a little quiter, but have had no failures of these either.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

6022tivo said:


> I still have a tivo with a 2003ish 120gb Hitachi and it is fine, the bearing are sounding louder than I remember, I did go for the samsung 120gb which was a little quiter, but have had no failures of these either.


Where oh where is our friend Mr Non Sighted Sharp Lemon Citrus.

It seems unlike him not to have things to say about the durability of various different makes of hard drive in Tivo upgrade use.

I would be particularly interested to hear from him which of the very large Seagate IDE hard drives he believes cannot be used in the Tivo due to excess power consumption requirements? I think the 500Gb and 750Gb IDE models were ruled out for that reason judging by the last opinions he gave on this issue.


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## iankb (Oct 9, 2000)

I've used Seagate quite a lot, but have also had a few failures, in both TiVo and PC. Nowadays, I use Western Digital.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

iankb said:


> I've used Seagate quite a lot, but have also had a few failures, in both TiVo and PC. Nowadays, I use Western Digital.


But others like Blindlemon report excess noise and early failures from Western Digital drives.

The only consistent theme that really emerges is of poor reliability and high noise on UK Thomson Tivos with Maxtors except that Weaknees (a USA equivalent of Blindlemon on a larger scale) seems to swear by Maxtor drives.

Perhaps its all down to luck then?


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## sanderton (Jan 4, 2002)

Yes. All drives fail, but unless you're IT manager for a very big firm, your personal experience does not a statistically valid sample make!


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

sanderton said:


> Yes. All drives fail, but unless you're IT manager for a very big firm, your personal experience does not a statistically valid sample make!


Or unless you happen to run a TivoHeaven and regularly fit hard drives from different manufacturers solely in one PVR imposing the same kind of demand loads and keep stats on how long different drives have lasted both when the owners ask for their first upgrade (if the reason was drive failure) and on any second or subsequent replacement of a drive your TivoHeaven emporium has itself installed.

After all the demands of the Tivo PVR environment may be such that it causes a failure rate in different makes of drive that is not a simple extrapolation of the failure rates of those drives in less demand non 24/7 operating environments that typify the world of general hard drive use in PCs.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

I don't have much experience of WD drives' reliability, but the ones that I've handled seem to have been noisy and hot compared to Seagate/Samsung drives.

Samsung HA250JC drives are the best for cool running and quietness, but they only have a 3 year warranty compared to the 5 years you get from Seagate. Seagate 7200rpm desktop drives are fine for TiVo use, but if you're planning to use the TiVo in your bedroom for instance then the slightly quieter seeks and reduced hum of an HA250JC make it a clear winner.

I have recently also been supplying Seagate CE drives (eg. ST3400833ACE) to customers ordering 400gb upgrades and have been impressed with the quiet seeks from these drives. They are still 7200rpm so the heat and noise are not quite up (or should I say down?) to Samsung HA250JC standards, but they are very nice quiet drives nevertheless.

And finally, I would *still* not voluntarily put a Maxtor drive in a TiVo regardless of how many people post to say they've been using a Maxtor successfully for 5+years


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## iankb (Oct 9, 2000)

In my experience, it tends to be a manufacturing batch of drives that fail early. Since I suspect that blindlemon buys in batches, it will depend on his luck as to which manufacturers he considers to be reliable. You will often find that different batches are made in different countries. Also, if very-badly manhandled during shipping, a complete batch is likely to be affected.

In my case, I've had a bad couple of batches of Seagates, no troubles with the IBM Deathstar, Western Digital, or a couple of Maxtors. I've not touched the Samsung since, when used in a PC, I like the superior performance of the Western Digital special edition drives. I'd probably consider Samsung for use in a very quiet environment. But when I do get a couple of Western Digital drives failing, I shall probably change my allegiance again.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

iankb said:


> Also, if very-badly manhandled during shipping, a complete batch is likely to be affected.


That's why I do a full surface scan on every drive before configuring it for TiVo use

Lukily Samsung have an excellent RMA service via www.rexo.co.uk with a 3-4 day turnaround and (so far) no questions asked, so the few drives that do make it through my testing and then go on to fail within my warranty period go straight back to them.

Seagate's direct RMA procedure is also good, but more complicated and a bit slower. Annoyingly, they replace RMA'd drives with "refurbished" drives with a green stripe around the label (unlike Samsung) so I tend to return defective Seagate drives to the supplier who replaces with new stock or refunds me. This works out pretty well, as a refund of the original purchase price of a drive bought 11 months ago is normally considerably more than the cost of a new replacement 

I guess I sell about equal numbers of Samsung and Seagate drives and, so far, I've not noticed any obvious difference in the failure rate. Both are very low once a drive has made it past my initial testing.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> I guess I sell about equal numbers of Samsung and Seagate drives and, so far, I've not noticed any obvious difference in the failure rate. Both are very low once a drive has made it past my initial testing.


Are you prepared to tell us how many drives you have installed in Tivos so far in total? 

Or is that commercially confidential. 

What size do these Samsung CE drives go up too? Is 400Gb the biggest? Is their 750Gb monster 7200.10 drive not quoted as for CE use or at least it draws too much power for a Tivo?

How many hours recording does one get out of 800GB (2 x 400Gb) configured for Mode 0 but with Save Disk Space enabled?

Also did Tiger never come out with MFS Tools V3 and does that mean that any drive upgrade beyond 1 x 300 Gb and 1 x250Gb as a pair can still only be done by the long and fiddly methods you described previously?


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

The CE drives are from Seagate and yes, they do have 500gb and 750gb variants with lower power consumption requirements than the standard 7200.9/7200.10 drives, which I hope to be auditioning soon if I can persuade my supplier to send me two of each on approval...

The reported capacity for an 800gb upgrade is 282 hours @ best, 990 @ basic quality. Enabling VBR should add at least 30% to those figures. 

MFSTools V3 is still not available, but the "long & fiddly" methods have been superseded by the discovery that you can use the -r4 switch to overcome the 274gb partition-size limit, so single 500gb drives or 2x400gb are now just as easy as smaller sizes. 

A note on the Weaknees site suggests that 2x750gb drives will exceed the TiVo software's capacity for reporting the number of hours, but that they work just fine in an S2 machine, so if I can get a couple on approval I'll be interested to see how they work in a UK TiVo


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> MFSTools V3 is still not available, but the "long & fiddly" methods have been superseded by the discovery that you can use the -r4 switch to overcome the 274gb partition-size limit, so single 500gb drives or 2x400gb are now just as easy as smaller sizes.


Isn't human ingenuity and curiosity a marvellous thing. 

But what about going from 2 x 250 Gb to 2 x 500Gb? Wouldn't that still present issues in terms of a direct copy over due to the partition and swap file sizes? So is the only way to start with an original Tivo image and upgrade to a 2 x 500 Gb system with no recordings on it and then install Tivoweb and all one's hacks again and load up the thumbs and Season Pass settings from the old Tivo that one has saved with the Tivoweb backup module?



> A note on the Weaknees site suggests that 2x750gb drives will exceed the TiVo software's capacity for reporting the number of hours, but that they work just fine in an S2 machine, so if I can get a couple on approval I'll be interested to see how they work in a UK TiVo


2 x 750Gb at Best should only be 525 hours but would also be 1840 hours or so at Basic. Are we saying the Tivo software can't report more than 1,000 hours of recording time although it can actually handle the recordings?

Having run with 613 hours at Basic I found the menus ran far too slowly for most people to accept and I would have thought at 525 hours at Best the problem would be similar even with VBR turned off. So I suspect that 2 x 500Gb may be a maximum practical limit to the hard drive size a Tivo S1 can satisfactorily use with VBR also turned off. That would be 350 hours at Basic with VBR off which a Tivo with a Cachecard and 512Mb of RAM should acommodate fairly satisfactorly. But exceed 400 hours of recordings or at least 400 items in Now Playing and menu speeds start to become unacceptably slow...............

Now may be if Jaffa could come up with a new Cachecard and/or a new driver for the current Cachecard then perhaps this particular limitation could somehow be overcome?


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> But what about going from 2 x 250 Gb to 2 x 500Gb? Wouldn't that still present issues in terms of a direct copy over due to the partition and swap file sizes?


That depends on your current partition layout.

If you imaged your 250gb A drive directly from a 40gb image then you will have 2 partitions on the A drive and one on the B drive, totalling 500gb - so as long as your new 500gb A drive is a big as the sum of your two 250gb drives then you should be OK. However, any other configuration will require you to make a divorced backup and re-install it from scratch, junking your recordings in the process.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> That depends on your current partition layout.
> 
> If you imaged your 250gb A drive directly from a 40gb image then you will have 2 partitions on the A drive and one on the B drive, totalling 500gb - so as long as your new 500gb A drive is a big as the sum of your two 250gb drives then you should be OK. However, any other configuration will require you to make a divorced backup and re-install it from scratch, junking your recordings in the process.


My current 250Gb A Drive came from a direct piped copy of the 30Gb and 15Gb Quantum A and B drives and my 250Gb B drive was then added to this with mfsadd afterwards as far as memory serves me.

Does this mean my only route is to junk the recordings and start from a clean image to go up to 2 x 500Gb?


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

www.amakia.com/customer/eStore/prodView.asp?idproduct=88338 currently seem to be offering the 750GB IDE Seagate SV35 drive for £83.92. Although it doesn't say what the delivery charge is unless you register as a customer it can't be more than £6 or £7. The website says they will have stock on 15th January.

Now although it says the drive is specifically developed for the surveillance industry I believe this in effect therefore also means it is appropriate for PVR use.

Perhaps somebody somewhere is now finding IDE vs SATA drives hard to sell for this application and so is wanting to clear them?

It would seem like the security industry's loss could well be Tivo owners gain, especially given the 5 year warranty also offered on these drives..........


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## bignoise (Oct 7, 2000)

That page also reports the drive capacity as "500gb" in the tech specs, even though it says 750gb in the header.


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## iankb (Oct 9, 2000)

The manufacturer's part number is for a 500GB drive.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

I suppose there had to be a catch at that price. Except that sometimes there are promotions that good during the sales.


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