# Expanded Bolt Storage



## DBRADSHER

What will be the best way to expand the storage on a BOLT?

External, Internal, weaknees?

Any issues expanding?

Thanks,

David


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## bradleys

Jcthorne, just ordered a bolt and a hard drive. You should have an answer to that question in a week or two I would expect.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=532346

Historically, an internal upgrade is always safer and more flexible then an external add-on drive. With the Roamio line, up to 3TB was just drop in a new drive easy.


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## DBRADSHER

Is there a downside just going with the external drive as an upgrade?

Thanks,

David


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## rifleman69

DBRADSHER said:


> Is there a downside just going with the external drive as an upgrade?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David


Two hard drives that both have to work instead of one. Yes that's a downside.


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## sangs

DBRADSHER said:


> Is there a downside just going with the external drive as an upgrade?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David


More cables and an extra point of failure, but otherwise, no.


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## jcthorne

And there is only one 1TB WD mybook drive that works. It also has a historically poor service life.


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## sangs

jcthorne said:


> And there is only one 1TB WD mybook drive that works. It also has a historically poor service life.


That's not been my experience. Until I replaced my FiOS 7232 DVRs last year, I'd been using two My Books without incident for nearly three years.


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## jth tv

I'd order one today if I can easily upgrade the hard drive. I currently use a Roamio Basic with a 3TB, paying monthly, 14 months old or so.


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## krkaufman

I'll be interested in anyone Dremeling through their enclosure in order to wire an externally-housed 3-6TB 3.5" drive as the internal drive.


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## aaronwt

krkaufman said:


> I'll be interested in anyone Dremeling through their enclosure in order to wire an externally-housed 3-6TB 3.5" drive as the internal drive.


We don't even know yet if you can change out the drives to work with a larger one. For all we know they have locked it from being upgraded. WHich wouldn't surprise me with other changes they have made this week.


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## bradleys

krkaufman said:


> I'll be interested in anyone Dremeling through their enclosure in order to wire an externally-housed 3-6TB 3.5" drive as the internal drive.


I am betting the Pro and Plus models have full size 3.5" drives. But it sure wouldn't be that hard to do. I would actually do it right and create a nice panel connector for it.


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## magnox

From its stupid curve design it may be running a 2.5" drive!


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## krkaufman

aaronwt said:


> We don't even know yet if you can change out the drives to work with a larger one. For all we know they have locked it from being upgraded. WHich wouldn't surprise me with other changes they have made this week.


I was assuming some brave soul would first verify the capability before taking the Dremel to the casing.


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## tarheelblue32

krkaufman said:


> I was assuming some brave soul would first verify the capability before taking the Dremel to the casing.


Drill baby drill.


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## keenanSR

tarheelblue32 said:


> Drill baby drill.


Get iFixit to do their thing on it.


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## jcthorne

magnox said:


> From its stupid curve design it may be running a 2.5" drive!


No maybe. It IS running a 2.5 inch drive. We don't yet know which one but we can guess based on prior builds. Will know for sure soon enough. If replacing the drive does not work, I'll return the drive and get the external expansion drive.

This currently limits upgrade path to 2TB internal if it will even format the drive like Roamio's do. Does not hurt to try. No real risk other than delays. Spousal unit is out of town for a couple weeks so if tivo is out of service or in some weird mode for a few days, no biggie.


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## HarperVision

magnox said:


> From its stupid curve design it *may* be running a 2.5" drive!


It is.


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## Tanquen

HarperVision said:


> It is.


Wow, that is crazy. There is just not that much space weight savings vs cost/size of storage to make a 2.5" drive a good way to go. Very lame. 

AKA: +$100 to go from a 500GB to 1TB Bolt when 3TB 3.5" drives can be had for $90.

The good and bad news is that there is still not enough 4k content to get me to upgrade the Kuro and receiver and the TiVo.

It's a tuff sell already having 2 3TB Roamios and it seems they'll never give me the simple little things like blocking shows I hate or telling me a show is not going to be recorded and the one pass stuff is still messed up.


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## JBDragon

magnox said:


> From its stupid curve design it may be running a 2.5" drive!


It is a dumb curve design!!! Didn't need to do that for cooling. It's a looks thing only and style seemed to have the upper hand.


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## mrfantasy

2.5" drives are usually quieter and have lower power consumption. So there's that.



Tanquen said:


> Wow, that is crazy. There is just not that much space weight savings vs cost/size of storage to make a 2.5" drive a good way to go. Very lame.
> 
> AKA: +$100 to go from a 500GB to 1TB Bolt when 3TB 3.5" drives can be had for $90.
> 
> The good and bad news is that there is still not enough 4k content to get me to upgrade the Kuro and receiver and the TiVo.
> 
> Its a tuff sell already having 2 3TB Roamios and it seems theyll never give me the simple little things like blocking shows I hate or telling me a show is not going to be recorded and the one pass stuff is still messed up.


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## Kremlar

jcthorne said:


> No maybe. It IS running a 2.5 inch drive. We don't yet know which one but we can guess based on prior builds. Will know for sure soon enough. If replacing the drive does not work, I'll return the drive and get the external expansion drive.
> 
> This currently limits upgrade path to 2TB internal if it will even format the drive like Roamio's do. Does not hurt to try. No real risk other than delays. Spousal unit is out of town for a couple weeks so if tivo is out of service or in some weird mode for a few days, no biggie.


What about this bad boy?

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Toshiba/MQ03ABB300/


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## aaronwt

Kremlar said:


> What about this bad boy?
> 
> http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Toshiba/MQ03ABB300/


No one even knows if that will fit in a Bolt. The 3TB Toshiba is 15mm high. And the 2TB WD is also 15mm high. WHile the WD 1TB and lower capacity A/V drives are 9.5mm or less.


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## Kremlar

> No one even knows if that will fit in a Bolt. The 3TB Toshiba is 15mm high. And the 2TB WD is also 15mm high. WHile the WD 1TB and lower capacity A/V drives are 9.5mm or less.


We'll know soon enough. This isn't a slim ultrabook we're talking about, so I would imagine TiVo would leave themselves extra clearance for taller drives. Doing so would give them more flexibility going forward without having to do a case redesign.

If they didn't I would fire the engineer.


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## ncbill

Samsung & Seagate both make 2.5" 4TB USB 3.0 external drives (under $200) if Tivo ever bothers to support external storage via the USB port.


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## Kremlar

ncbill said:


> Samsung & Seagate both make 2.5" 4TB USB 3.0 external drives (under $200) if Tivo ever bothers to support external storage via the USB port.


Kind of wondering why they didn't go with USB 3.0 for external storage. Is eSATA an advantage nowadays? Perhaps to increase the chance of someone purchasing external storage through them?


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## aaronwt

ncbill said:


> Samsung & Seagate both make 2.5" 4TB USB 3.0 external drives (under $200) if Tivo ever bothers to support external storage via the USB port.


Where are these drives? The largest 2.5 inch drive I've read about is the Toshiba 3TB which came out this year.

I do own two Seagate fast plus external drives. They are usb powered 4TB external drives. But they only have 4TB because they use two 2.5", low power, 2TB drives in a RAID 0 configuration.


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## trip1eX

ncbill said:


> Samsung & Seagate both make 2.5" 4TB USB 3.0 external drives (under $200) if Tivo ever bothers to support external storage via the USB port.


I don't see why you'd have to limit yourself to 2.5" drives for external storage.


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## zerdian1

DBRADSHER said:


> Is there a downside just going with the external drive as an upgrade?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> David


The downside is if you use the official TiVo Upgrade it is a WD 1TB eSata. 
So the most official storage is 2TB.

WeaKnees will probably offer something like 12TB Series 6 BOLT, 
if they follow the same path they did for Series 5 Roamio.

LOW END RANGE SERIES 6 TIVO BOLT:
I think these two versions 4 tuners and 500Gb and 1000GB storage for BOLT are their first introduction to Series 6 with 4K were the LOW END RANGE SERIES 6 TIVO BOLT.

MIDDLE RANGE SERIES 6 TIVO BOLT:
I expect that the other one year project on Roamio MEGA will start to influence later introductions of BOLT.
I think mid range BOLT will start with 3TB and 6TB internal storage versions.
Since TiVo stuck with eSata, they are stuck at an official 1TB expansion drive.
Since WD digital has dropped eSata R&D some time ago.

TiVo already has 6 Tuner technology in their Roamio Plus and Roamio Pro.
So the mid range BOLT will have 6 tuners.

HIGH END RANGE SERIES 6 BOLT:
I think this will be targeted to Pros and Streaming Companies that are hoping up all over the place..
I would guess they will have 8 to 12 tuners.
that it will have modular storage and probably use the 
RAID technology from the Roamio MEGA program.
I would guess they will offer 20TB to 50TB with prices starting at $5K.


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## ncbill

2.5" external bus-powered USB drives are a whole lot more convenient than dealing with 3.5" external drives plus another power supply.

Samsung & Seagate 4TB 2.5" USB 3.0 models are both at newegg - looking at the pics they are clearly single drives.


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## jcthorne

aaronwt said:


> No one even knows if that will fit in a Bolt. The 3TB Toshiba is 15mm high. And the 2TB WD is also 15mm high. WHile the WD 1TB and lower capacity A/V drives are 9.5mm or less.


The Seagate 2TB is 9.5mm


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## aaronwt

ncbill said:


> 2.5" external bus-powered USB drives are a whole lot more convenient than dealing with 3.5" external drives plus another power supply.
> 
> Samsung & Seagate 4TB 2.5" USB 3.0 models are both at newegg - looking at the pics they are clearly single drives.


OK I see that seagate drive. It is brand new. It was just released in July and seems to be the first of its kind.


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## trip1eX

ncbill said:


> 2.5" external bus-powered USB drives are a whole lot more convenient than dealing with 3.5" external drives plus another power supply.


For mobile use yes.

But not for this use.


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## b_scott

bradleys said:


> Jcthorne, just ordered a bolt and a hard drive. You should have an answer to that question in a week or two I would expect.
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=532346
> 
> Historically, an internal upgrade is always safer and more flexible then an external add-on drive. With the Roamio line, up to 3TB was just drop in a new drive easy.


but now it's 2.5 drive so buying one of those in a large size is going to be expensive.


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## b_scott

sangs said:


> That's not been my experience. Until I replaced my FiOS 7232 DVRs last year, I'd been using two My Books without incident for nearly three years.


My parents' died after 3 years or so. I had one which I sold, that was OK for about that amount of time but who knows if it died after.


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## b_scott

Tanquen said:


> Wow, that is crazy. There is just not that much space weight savings vs cost/size of storage to make a 2.5" drive a good way to go. Very lame.
> 
> AKA: +$100 to go from a 500GB to 1TB Bolt when 3TB 3.5" drives can be had for $90.
> 
> The good and bad news is that there is still not enough 4k content to get me to upgrade the Kuro and receiver and the TiVo.
> 
> Its a tuff sell already having 2 3TB Roamios and it seems theyll never give me the simple little things like blocking shows I hate or telling me a show is not going to be recorded and the one pass stuff is still messed up.


I don't think I'm ever planning on going 4K. My Kuro is just too good. I'll wait for 8K and decide then. There are already 8K TVs but they're $100K


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## keenanSR

b_scott said:


> I don't think I'm ever planning on going 4K. My Kuro is just too good. I'll wait for 8K and decide then. There are already 8K TVs but they're $100K


Plus, there are far less expensive boxes(Roku, FireTV, etc) that will give you 4K streaming when/if you get a 4K display.

I'm basically in the same place, having picked up a Samsung F8500(absolutely gorgeous picture) a year ago I'm not anywhere near ready to move into 4K and as long as TiVo maintains service to a Roamio Plus for the next 3 years picking one of those up with Lifetime for $450 seems like a better deal. For me anyway.


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## b_scott

Kremlar said:


> Kind of wondering why they didn't go with USB 3.0 for external storage. Is eSATA an advantage nowadays? Perhaps to increase the chance of someone purchasing external storage through them?


eSata is 3gbps (USB 2.0 was .5gbps) but USB 3.0 is 5gbps. However I'm not sure if there is a difference in sustained input/output.

Are we sure the Bolt even has USB 3.0? Doesn't seem like it would need it for anything.


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## krkaufman

b_scott said:


> Are we sure the Bolt even has USB 3.0? Doesn't seem like it would need it for anything.


The BOLT specs sheet indicates 2 USB 2.0 ports.


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## b_scott

krkaufman said:


> The BOLT specs sheet indicates 2 USB 2.0 ports.


there you go. so no, it will never add USB storage.


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## TIVO_GUY_HERE

I have a sata drive hooked up to a tivo premiere ( 2 tuner) that I want to remove and put on my new Bolt. I am pretty sure I will need to do a C.D.E before I remove this external hard drive, but will that be it? Will the bolt just re-format it to the specs it needs?


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## atmuscarella

TIVO_GUY_HERE said:


> I have a sata drive hooked up to a tivo premiere ( 2 tuner) that I want to remove and put on my new Bolt. I am pretty sure I will need to do a C.D.E before I remove this external hard drive, but will that be it? Will the bolt just re-format it to the specs it needs?


It should just reformat it, but I would wait until you actually need the space before adding it.


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## sangs

b_scott said:


> My parents' died after 3 years or so. I had one which I sold, that was OK for about that amount of time but who knows if it died after.


The disk itself, or the enclosure? It's been my experience that enclosures fail before disks, but those can be replaceable.


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## series5orpremier

b_scott said:


> I don't think I'm ever planning on going 4K. My Kuro is just too good.


Ditto re/my Samsung F8500.


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## b_scott

sangs said:


> The disk itself, or the enclosure? It's been my experience that enclosures fail before disks, but those can be replaceable.


honestly don't know. we tossed it. they ended up getting a large enough 4 tuner Premiere.


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## randian

series5orpremier said:


> Ditto re/my Samsung F8500.


Ditto Panasonic VT60.


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## series5orpremier

I dig it. GT25 sits side by side with the F8500.

Now in an effort to be on topic, I am intrigued to find out how upgrade-able these small hard drives are. In case there's a fire sale down the line the 1.3X FF and processing power might be nice if one of my Roamios dies.


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## Bigg

Kremlar said:


> We'll know soon enough. This isn't a slim ultrabook we're talking about, so I would imagine TiVo would leave themselves extra clearance for taller drives. Doing so would give them more flexibility going forward without having to do a case redesign.
> 
> If they didn't I would fire the engineer.


Well, I'd fire any engineer who put a 2.5" drive in a DVR, so you're making a big leap there. It remains to be seen what the bracket and case can actually handle drive wise.


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## HarperVision

Bigg said:


> Well, I'd fire any engineer who put a 2.5" drive in a DVR, so you're making a big leap there. It remains to be seen what the bracket and case can actually handle drive wise.


I have the DirecTV Genie Lite Receiver that is capable of being a DVR with the external eSATAp HDD Kit, which I have and is connected. The Kit is a small portable 2.5" HDD at 1TB. It seems to be working fine for the last few weeks I've had it installed. I haven't had any issues whatsoever.


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## Bigg

HarperVision said:


> I have the DirecTV Genie Lite Receiver that is capable of being a DVR with the external eSATAp HDD Kit, which I have and is connected. The Kit is a small portable 2.5" HDD at 1TB. It seems to be working fine for the last few weeks I've had it installed. I haven't had any issues whatsoever.


I'm not saying it won't work, just that there is no reason to give up the cheaper 3.5" drives that have more capacity options when designing a DVR. 2.5" drives were for laptops. In today's world, I see no use for 2.5" hard drives. Most laptops don't even have 2.5" bays anymore, as they use those thin little card-shaped SSDs, mSATA I think.


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## Kremlar

Bigg said:


> I'm not saying it won't work, just that there is no reason to give up the cheaper 3.5" drives that have more capacity options when designing a DVR. 2.5" drives were for laptops. In today's world, I see no use for 2.5" hard drives. Most laptops don't even have 2.5" bays anymore, as they use those thin little card-shaped SSDs, mSATA I think.


Not true. Most mainstream laptops still use 2.5" form factor drives. I update them out of the box to SSDs all the time.

The 2.5" form factor is taking over the market. Most servers are using 2.5" drives as well. We use M.2 SSDs only in NUCs for now. We don't even use 3.5" drives in desktops anymore.

I think you'll see large capacity 2.5" drives soon. 4TB will probably be common within a year.


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## Jed1

Bigg said:


> I'm not saying it won't work, just that there is no reason to give up the cheaper 3.5" drives that have more capacity options when designing a DVR. 2.5" drives were for laptops. In today's world, I see no use for 2.5" hard drives. Most laptops don't even have 2.5" bays anymore, as they use those thin little card-shaped SSDs, mSATA I think.


Pace has been using them in their RNG 200 series DVR's for over three years now. I was issued one of these DVRs in 2012 when my cable company was bought buy another family members. 
I am surprised it took TiVo this long to finally start using them.


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## trip1eX

2.5" drives are quieter and more efficient in general which are good attributes for a dvr that runs 24/7 in your living room or bedroom. More expensive and less capacity though. 

IF they release a PRo version wonder if it will have one of these or not. 3tb laptop drives don't exist. AT least they aren't for sale on Newegg.


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## aaronwt

trip1eX said:


> 2.5" drives are quieter and more efficient in general which are good attributes for a dvr that runs 24/7 in your living room or bedroom. More expensive and less capacity though.
> 
> IF they release a PRo version wonder if it will have one of these or not. 3tb laptop drives don't exist. AT least they aren't for sale on Newegg.


Actually the specs listed for the WD AV drives list that most of the 2.5" drives are louder than the 3.5" drives. The 3.5" 3TB, 2TB, and 1TB AV drives are listed as having 23dBA at idle and 24dBA during seek.
The 2.5" 1TB AV drive is listed as having 24dBA at idle and 25dBA at seek.

Although one 2.5" 500GB Av version is quieter. With 17dBA idle and 22dBA seek(while another 500GB version is the same loudness as the 1TB.

The 3.5" 500GB AV drives lists 21dBA idle and 22dBA seek.

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701250.pdf

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-800020.pdf

Or am I reading that wrong and it actually means something different?


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## andyw715

TIVO_GUY_HERE said:


> I have a sata drive hooked up to a tivo premiere ( 2 tuner) that I want to remove and put on my new Bolt. I am pretty sure I will need to do a C.D.E before I remove this external hard drive, but will that be it? Will the bolt just re-format it to the specs it needs?


Once you un-marry it from your Premiere, any recordings that happened after the original marry process will not be accessible (since the recordings are striped over both drives.

Marrying to the Bolt should format the external so the Bolt can append that space to its internal drive resulting in what it thinks is a larger single drive.


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## magnox

zerdian1 said:


> The downside is if you use the official TiVo Upgrade it is a WD 1TB eSata.
> So the most official storage is 2TB.
> 
> WeaKnees will probably offer something like 12TB Series 6 BOLT,
> if they follow the same path they did for Series 5 Roamio.
> 
> LOW END RANGE SERIES 6 TIVO BOLT:
> I think these two versions 4 tuners and 500Gb and 1000GB storage for BOLT are their first introduction to Series 6 with 4K were the LOW END RANGE SERIES 6 TIVO BOLT.
> 
> MIDDLE RANGE SERIES 6 TIVO BOLT:
> I expect that the other one year project on Roamio MEGA will start to influence later introductions of BOLT.
> I think mid range BOLT will start with 3TB and 6TB internal storage versions.
> Since TiVo stuck with eSata, they are stuck at an official 1TB expansion drive.
> Since WD digital has dropped eSata R&D some time ago.
> 
> TiVo already has 6 Tuner technology in their Roamio Plus and Roamio Pro.
> So the mid range BOLT will have 6 tuners.
> 
> HIGH END RANGE SERIES 6 BOLT:
> I think this will be targeted to Pros and Streaming Companies that are hoping up all over the place..
> I would guess they will have 8 to 12 tuners.
> that it will have modular storage and probably use the
> RAID technology from the Roamio MEGA program.
> I would guess they will offer 20TB to 50TB with prices starting at $5K.


So you expect the next bolts to follow a different design allowing 3.5" drives?


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## krkaufman

magnox said:


> So you expect the next bolts to follow a different design allowing 3.5" drives?


I do, similar to how the Plus & Pro were different from the base Roamio (and OTA). *IF* the BOLT "Pro" were to come forward, I have a very hard time seeing it having any less than 6 tuners, and to go along with those tuners, anything less than 3TB of storage -- though I'd expect maybe even options for 6TB, and you won't hit 6TB in a 2.5" drive (in the timeframe needed).


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## magnox

Bigg said:


> I'm not saying it won't work, just that there is no reason to give up the cheaper 3.5" drives that have more capacity options when designing a DVR. 2.5" drives were for laptops. In today's world, I see no use for 2.5" hard drives. Most laptops don't even have 2.5" bays anymore, as they use those thin little card-shaped SSDs, mSATA I think.


Plenty of servers use 2.5" drives; infact SAS drives have quicker seek times on a 2.5" platter vs a 3.5".


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## magnox

krkaufman said:


> I do, similar to how the Plus & Pro were different from the base Roamio (and OTA). *IF* the BOLT "Pro" were to come forward, I have a very hard time seeing it having any less than 6 tuners, and to go along with those tuners, anything less than 3TB of storage -- though I'd expect maybe even options for 6TB, and you won't hit 6TB in a 2.5" drive (in the timeframe needed).


I would agree - even a 2tb 2.5" is too small for a pro model - id expect a different shell too.


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## krkaufman

magnox said:


> I would agree - even a 2tb 2.5" is too small for a pro model - id expect a different shell too.


Actually, I have a small expectation that a BOLT "Pro" might even include solid state storage for driving the OS and UI, and use a separate, possibly swapable magnetic drive for recordings.


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## magnox

krkaufman said:


> Actually, I have a small expectation that a BOLT "Pro" might even include solid state storage for driving the OS and UI, and use a separate, possibly swapable magnetic drive for recordings.


Yeah ssd would be useless for recording due to cell wear but os boot/operation would be all reads. Wonder if tivo would spend the money


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## krkaufman

magnox said:


> Yeah ssd would be useless for recording due to cell wear but os boot/operation would be all reads. Wonder if tivo would spend the money


I wouldn't think the cost increase would be all that significant, since the OS (non-recordings storage) doesn't require that much space. Not sure what kind of speed improvement would really be gained, though, given so much drive access to list recordings and all the Internet pulls for OnePass/etc data.


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## randian

magnox said:


> Plenty of servers use 2.5" drives; infact SAS drives have quicker seek times on a 2.5" platter vs a 3.5".


That would be great if random access was important. Seek times don't matter in a continuous streaming application.


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## lessd

krkaufman said:


> Actually, I have a small expectation that a BOLT "Pro" might even include solid state storage for driving the OS and UI, and use a separate, possibly swapable magnetic drive for recordings.


I though the Roamio has solid state storage for the UI and OS, that why you can drop in a blank drive and it will work.


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## krkaufman

lessd said:


> I though the Roamio has solid state storage for the UI and OS, that why you can drop in a blank drive and it will work.


I was assuming that that was just an installable read-only copy of the OS on a chip, restorable to the hard drive, not a writable, working copy of the OS.


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## trip1eX

aaronwt said:


> Actually the specs listed for the WD AV drives list that most of the 2.5" drives are louder than the 3.5" drives. The 3.5" 3TB, 2TB, and 1TB AV drives are listed as having 23dBA at idle and 24dBA during seek.
> The 2.5" 1TB AV drive is listed as having 24dBA at idle and 25dBA at seek.
> 
> Although one 2.5" 500GB Av version is quieter. With 17dBA idle and 22dBA seek(while another 500GB version is the same loudness as the 1TB.
> 
> The 3.5" 500GB AV drives lists 21dBA idle and 22dBA seek.
> 
> http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701250.pdf
> 
> http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-800020.pdf
> 
> Or am I reading that wrong and it actually means something different?


They have a 320gb 2.5" that is also much quieter. That and the 500gb 2.5" model have an L in the model number.

So it seems like they can make AV 2.5" drives quite a bit quieter if they want to compared to their 3.5" AV counterparts - none of which are close to 17 and 22 dbAs.

I don't exactly know the reasons a 2.5" drive is quieter than a 3.5" HD other than a 2.5" HD spins at lower speeds than the average 3.5" drive. OF course, in this case, we're talking 3.5" AV drives which spin at lower rpms. RPMs that are much closer to those of a regular laptop drive.

I'd guess the louder sounding laptop drives either don't have sound proofing in them or have multiple platters compared to the quieter model numbers. And I'd guess the 3.5" AV lineup is more mature and has sound proofing across the board while some of 2.5" AV lineup might just be regular laptop drives with the AV label slapped on them.


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## atmuscarella

krkaufman said:


> I was assuming that that was just an installable read-only copy of the OS on a chip, restorable to the hard drive, not a writable, working copy of the OS.


I just did a hard drive upgrade to my 2 year old Roamio and on the first boot it had the current software so I am guessing the OS is not on the hard drive at all or the version on the chip is updated.


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## andyw715

Well at least TiVo's CMO sort of addressed user installed storage. 

He could have stopped at "opening the box voids the warranty" but did mention the tear downs that will happen as a "we shall see soon enough"

I think I'm going to hold out a bit on the roamio plus loyalty deal until this is answered. 

If drive swaps are possible and the performance gains are very noticeable I might get a bolt.


----------



## Bigg

Kremlar said:


> Not true. Most mainstream laptops still use 2.5" form factor drives. I update them out of the box to SSDs all the time.
> 
> The 2.5" form factor is taking over the market. Most servers are using 2.5" drives as well. We use M.2 SSDs only in NUCs for now. We don't even use 3.5" drives in desktops anymore.
> 
> I think you'll see large capacity 2.5" drives soon. 4TB will probably be common within a year.


It looks like a few of the boring old-school laptops do, but the MBP, MBA, and the Ultrabooks, Yoga, and similar don't have enough physical space for a 2.5" drive.

People who are building desktops are mostly using 2.5" SSDs and 3.5" HDDs, with the OS and programs on the 2.5" SSD. By the time the 2.5" drives get to 4TB, there will be 8TB or larger 3.5" drives, or they will just be that much cheaper than 2.5". 2.5" just seems like a legacy thing. 3.5" for large-capacity disk storage, and M.2 or whatnot for SSDs.



magnox said:


> Plenty of servers use 2.5" drives; infact SAS drives have quicker seek times on a 2.5" platter vs a 3.5".


Who's using 2.5" in a server? If you're storing a crapton of data, you want 3.5" drives, if you care about seek times, you're going to need an SSD. OSes and applications shouldn't be on old mechanical hard drives, those are for storage only these days.


----------



## geko29

Bigg said:


> *Who's using 2.5" in a server?* If you're storing a crapton of data, you want 3.5" drives, if you care about seek times, you're going to need an SSD. OSes and applications shouldn't be on old mechanical hard drives, those are for storage only these days.


Um....everybody? Blade servers are dominant these days, and I can't recall ever seeing one with 3.5" bays. Nearly all have 2.5" drives, if they have drives at all. They're even starting to get rare in rackmount servers--24x2TB is a hell of a lot faster than 12x4TB, and not that much more expensive. Rebuilds are also several times faster, which means data loss from drive failure is far less likely.

And local storage is still a hell of a lot cheaper than shared storage. If you've ever seen a Hadoop cluster, it's typically made up of rack after rack of 2U servers, each stuffed with 24x2.5" drives.

Enterprise flash is getting cheaper, but still crazy expensive--I pay about $10,000/TB raw (winds up being more like $3-4k/TB usable once compression, deduplication, and redundancy are factored in). But even that comes in a 2.5" formfactor. In fact, the expansion shelves those SSD modules go into are literally the same part as in the older array from another manufacturer I use for bulk storage (which has 144x2.5" and 12x3.5" drives)


----------



## Kremlar

Bigg said:


> It looks like a few of the boring old-school laptops do, but the MBP, MBA, and the Ultrabooks, Yoga, and similar don't have enough physical space for a 2.5" drive.


No, the most common and most sold mainstream laptops use 2.5" drives. Many of the high-end, low qty sold, ultrabooks (and maybe the cheapest Chromebooks) do not.

You're not making any sense to me. You say it makes no sense for TiVo to go with 2.5" drives because they are not sold with ultrabooks anymore? So, are you saying TiVo should have went with an even lower capacity M.2 SSD??? 2.5" drives are a great compromise for this level of DVR. Lower heat, lower power, lower weight, smaller size. The Pro model will likely use a 3.5" drive still.



> People who are building desktops are mostly using 2.5" SSDs and 3.5" HDDs, with the OS and programs on the 2.5" SSD. By the time the 2.5" drives get to 4TB, there will be 8TB or larger 3.5" drives, or they will just be that much cheaper than 2.5". 2.5" just seems like a legacy thing. 3.5" for large-capacity disk storage, and M.2 or whatnot for SSDs.


I think you're wrong. More and more 2.5" models are being released all the time. Why is it that we don't see 5.25" hard drives anymore? Why not? They would fit in today's chassis. 3.5" drives will go the way of the dinosaur in a few years except maybe in the highest-capacities available.

The desktop is going the way of the NUC, which will support M.2 SSDs and 2.5" form factor. Except for high-end workstations and gamer PCs of course, which are just a small percentage of the total # sold.



> Who's using 2.5" in a server? If you're storing a crapton of data, you want 3.5" drives, if you care about seek times, you're going to need an SSD. OSes and applications shouldn't be on old mechanical hard drives, those are for storage only these days.


Are you serious? Just about all modern servers use 2.5" drives. Some also support 3.5" drives. Enterprise SSDs are still too expensive for servers in most cases, though many RAID cards will use them as cache drives. I only know of only 1 reasonable SSD that supports SED (and I don't even know if it's readily available), which is a must for many organizations nowadays.


----------



## Bigg

geko29 said:


> Um....everybody? Blade servers are dominant these days, and I can't recall ever seeing one with 3.5" bays. Nearly all have 2.5" drives, if they have drives at all. They're even starting to get rare in rackmount servers--24x2TB is a hell of a lot faster than 12x4TB, and not that much more expensive. Rebuilds are also several times faster, which means data loss from drive failure is far less likely.
> 
> And local storage is still a hell of a lot cheaper than shared storage. If you've ever seen a Hadoop cluster, it's typically made up of rack after rack of 2U servers, each stuffed with 24x2.5" drives.


Ooookay. 2.5" drives make no sense to me whatsoever. They are an artifact of the pre-SSD laptop world as far as I'm concerned.



> Enterprise flash is getting cheaper, but still crazy expensive--I pay about $10,000/TB raw (winds up being more like $3-4k/TB usable once compression, deduplication, and redundancy are factored in). But even that comes in a 2.5" formfactor. In fact, the expansion shelves those SSD modules go into are literally the same part as in the older array from another manufacturer I use for bulk storage (which has 144x2.5" and 12x3.5" drives)


Whoa! Does the consumer grade stuff actually fail when put into servers? Wouldn't it be cheaper to figure out how long it lasts and keep replacing it with more cheap consumer grade drives until enterprise grade stuff comes out of the stratosphere?


----------



## Kremlar

> Whoa! Does the consumer grade stuff actually fail when put into servers? Wouldn't it be cheaper to figure out how long it lasts and keep replacing it with more cheap consumer grade drives until enterprise grade stuff comes out of the stratosphere?


Yes, consumer drives are unreliable and do fail far more quickly when used in enterprise scenarios. No one responsible in a business environment wants to screw with data and uptime by using consumer grade drives. And if they do, they'll probably be fired.


----------



## geko29

Bigg said:


> Ooookay. 2.5" drives make no sense to me whatsoever. They are an artifact of the pre-SSD laptop world as far as I'm concerned.


I agree where laptops are concerned. I deployed my last spinning disk in a notebook 4+ years ago, and I think I'm down to two out in the wild that haven't been refreshed yet. But that has no bearing whatsoever on what's appropriate for servers or DVRs.



Bigg said:


> Whoa! Does the consumer grade stuff actually fail when put into servers? Wouldn't it be cheaper to figure out how long it lasts and keep replacing it with more cheap consumer grade drives until enterprise grade stuff comes out of the stratosphere?


It fails VERY quickly if you don't deal with it properly. The $10k/TB in my example is actually using MLC drives (think high-end consumer like Samsung 840) with custom enterprise firmware. So the physical pieces of NAND flash aren't the expensive part. The huge cost delta comes from the controllers (4x10 core Xeon processors, 512GB of RAM, 16GB of NVRAM, plus 8x16Gb Fiber Channel, 4x10Gb Ethernet, and Infiniband connectivity) and custom software (in-line deduplication and compression, always-on encryption, multiple layers of parity) that makes it perform to enterprise standards. I've had zero module failures on my 72 modules in 3+ years, while regularly doing 100k+ IOPS and transferring 2+ GigaBYTES (big B) per second of I/O. There's absolutely zero chance you could come even close to this by just throwing off-the-shelf MLC modules into a server, and the failure rate would be astronomical. Then there's maintenance and support, which runs $100k-120k per array for 3 years. It all adds up very quickly.

If you start looking at arrays where the flash modules themselves are enterprise-grade SLC flash, you're looking at more like $25,000/TB raw. Even Fusion-IO cards, which are PCI-Express boards using MLC flash and none of this fancy software or redundancy features cost upwards of $5,000/TB.

At any rate, we're digressing. As far as spinning platters are concerned, 2.5" drives are both the present and the future. Over time they'll be supplanted by solid state media (just as they've supplanted 3.5" drives, which in turn supplanted 5.25" drives), but that's still a relatively long road for non-portable devices.


----------



## Bigg

Kremlar said:


> Yes, consumer drives are unreliable and do fail far more quickly when used in enterprise scenarios. No one responsible in a business environment wants to screw with data and uptime by using consumer grade drives. And if they do, they'll probably be fired.


Aren't most things these days virtualized onto pretty commoditized hardware anyway, so that if one physical server goes out, nothing stops working? When you virtualize everything over a cluster of servers, you save so much, as you no longer need redundant NICs, redundant PSUs, etc, etc. I could understand not wanting cheap stuff if you're not virtualized though.



geko29 said:


> I agree where laptops are concerned. I deployed my last spinning disk in a notebook 4+ years ago, and I think I'm down to two out in the wild that haven't been refreshed yet. But that has no bearing whatsoever on what's appropriate for servers or DVRs.


Which would logically use 3.5" drives anyway.



> At any rate, we're digressing. As far as spinning platters are concerned, 2.5" drives are both the present and the future. Over time they'll be supplanted by solid state media (just as they've supplanted 3.5" drives, which in turn supplanted 5.25" drives), but that's still a relatively long road for non-portable devices.


Interesting digression. I just don't see how 2.5" drives are the future of anything. They are some middleground that's not really good at either end of the spectrum represented by 3.5" spinning HDDs and SSDs.

In the way long run, sure, everything might be flash, but that's a LONG, LONG way off. I think, I hope, that within a few years, all PCs and laptops will no longer boot off of HDDs, and some will have a secondary HDD for storage only. And servers will basically do the same. At the end user level, SSDs are the new RAM. It took years for people to catch on to the fact that computers needed more RAM to feel faster. Now people don't get SSDs, since they have no clue how much of a day to day difference they can make.

Back to DVRs, I see absolutely zero legitimate reason why a DVR should use a 2.5" drive. 3.5" drives are faster, cheaper, and available in larger capacities. It's not like the size difference is relevant when you're making a set top box that is just about the same size as the VCRs that they replaced back in 1999.


----------



## aaronwt

Bigg said:


> .................
> Back to DVRs, I see absolutely zero legitimate reason why a DVR should use a 2.5" drive. 3.5" drives are faster, cheaper, and available in larger capacities. It's not like the size difference is relevant when you're making a set top box that is just about the same size as the VCRs that they replaced back in 1999.


The only two things that a 2.5" drive has an advantage with is size and power usage/heat. You can fit a 2.5" drive in a much smaller enclosure and they can also use less power/generate less heat. I would think size would be the biggest factor. And by the look of the Bolt Design, size would be the reason they are using the 2.5" drive. Because the Bolt looks very small compared to previous TiVos. At least based on a picture next to the remote. I'll need to try and see one in person later this month.


----------



## geko29

Bigg said:


> Aren't most things these days virtualized onto pretty commoditized hardware anyway, so that if one physical server goes out, nothing stops working? When you virtualize everything over a cluster of servers, you save so much, as you no longer need redundant NICs, redundant PSUs, etc, etc. I could understand not wanting cheap stuff if you're not virtualized though.


You've got it exactly backwards. Virtualization dramatically INcreases the impact of a failure. Now instead of taking down a single server, the failure of a critical component(s) causes 20-50 systems to simultaneously disappear. So back in the day where a pair of local hard drives, one or two NICs and a couple of power supplies would have been considered sufficient insurance for a server running on bare metal, I now run hosts that have 8 paths to shared storage on two physically separate networks, 6 or more NICs per host (again going to physically disparate networks) in enclosures that can tolerate the simultaneous failure of 3 power supplies, 4 fans, and an IO module.

This becomes even MORE critical where storage is concerned. If an array loses enough drive modules to go offline, now you're talking about the failure of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of machines, with little to no hope for recovery. You are now out of business.



Bigg said:


> Which would logically use 3.5" drives anyway.


Incorrect, read my prior post. 3.5" drives have long since gone the way of the dodo in the server market. I bought my last server with 3.5" drives seven years ago, the 100+ since then have all been set up for 2.5". As I said previously, there are no blade servers (which currently dominate the market) that use 3.5" drives. Here is HP's current rack server lineup. While there may be a model or two that has the option of 3.5" drives, none are obvious at first glance. Likewise for Dell, and  Cisco. Lenovo actually shows ONE model with 3.5" drives, but all the rest have 2.5"



Bigg said:


> Interesting digression. I just don't see how 2.5" drives are the future of anything. They are some middleground that's not really good at either end of the spectrum represented by 3.5" spinning HDDs and SSDs.


You may not see it, but that's the way it is.



Bigg said:


> In the way long run, sure, everything might be flash, but that's a LONG, LONG way off. I think, I hope, that within a few years, all PCs and laptops will no longer boot off of HDDs, and some will have a secondary HDD for storage only. And servers will basically do the same. At the end user level, SSDs are the new RAM. It took years for people to catch on to the fact that computers needed more RAM to feel faster. Now people don't get SSDs, since they have no clue how much of a day to day difference they can make.


It's not as far off as you may think. Except for some 6-year old firewalls with 160GB drives that were recently replaced, I haven't had a single spinning platter in my primary datacenter for almost three years.



Bigg said:


> Back to DVRs, I see absolutely zero legitimate reason why a DVR should use a 2.5" drive. 3.5" drives are faster, cheaper, and available in larger capacities. It's not like the size difference is relevant when you're making a set top box that is just about the same size as the VCRs that they replaced back in 1999.


You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but it's apparent that Tivo disagrees with you. They obviously chose the marginally more expensive 2.5" drives for a reason. My guess is space, power, and cooling. iFixit will probably answer that question for us in the coming days.


----------



## Kremlar

Bigg said:


> Aren't most things these days virtualized onto pretty commoditized hardware anyway, so that if one physical server goes out, nothing stops working? When you virtualize everything over a cluster of servers, you save so much, as you no longer need redundant NICs, redundant PSUs, etc, etc. I could understand not wanting cheap stuff if you're not virtualized though.


I think you are confusing failover clustering and virtualization. Most small to medium size businesses are not using failover clustering, but just about all (at least the ones I work with) are virtualizing. Even if they you were using failover clustering it's not an excuse to use hardware not suited for the task. It's irresponsible and foolish.


----------



## jonw747

krkaufman said:


> Actually, I have a small expectation that a BOLT "Pro" might even include solid state storage for driving the OS and UI, and use a separate, possibly swapable magnetic drive for recordings.


If Sony can design a user upgradable internal hard drive in to their consoles, TiVo could do it. Heck, 2 slots would be great.


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## b_scott

geko29 said:


> You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but it's apparent that Tivo disagrees with you. They obviously chose the marginally more expensive 2.5" drives for a reason. My guess is space, power, and cooling. iFixit will probably answer that question for us in the coming days.


personally I think it was just to make the box seem smaller. People are getting to the point where everything must be "smaller than the last year" and pucks like the Apple TV and Roku are the thing now. So perception of a smaller Tivo is important, marketing-wise.


----------



## HarperVision

b_scott said:


> personally I think it was just to make the box seem smaller. People are getting to the point where everything must be "smaller than the last year" and pucks like the Apple TV and Roku are the thing now. So perception of a smaller Tivo is important, marketing-wise.


So how do you explain the "Phablet" craze? These so called "phones" are getting HUGE!


----------



## Bigg

aaronwt said:


> The only two things that a 2.5" drive has an advantage with is size and power usage/heat. You can fit a 2.5" drive in a much smaller enclosure and they can also use less power/generate less heat. I would think size would be the biggest factor. And by the look of the Bolt Design, size would be the reason they are using the 2.5" drive. Because the Bolt looks very small compared to previous TiVos. At least based on a picture next to the remote. I'll need to try and see one in person later this month.


Yeah, they compromised on function for the form. Bad idea.



geko29 said:


> You've got it exactly backwards. Virtualization dramatically INcreases the impact of a failure. Now instead of taking down a single server, the failure of a critical component(s) causes 20-50 systems to simultaneously disappear. So back in the day where a pair of local hard drives, one or two NICs and a couple of power supplies would have been considered sufficient insurance for a server running on bare metal, I now run hosts that have 8 paths to shared storage on two physically separate networks, 6 or more NICs per host (again going to physically disparate networks) in enclosures that can tolerate the simultaneous failure of 3 power supplies, 4 fans, and an IO module.


Well, yeah, if you're putting a bunch of virtualized servers on one single piece of hardware with a single piece of failure, than yeah, you're setting yourself up for disaster. I was referring to virtualization like VMWare ESXi or similar product where you've got a bunch of physical servers handling far more virtual servers, so that if one physical server goes offline, another server, possibly in another physical location, picks up the slack with no disruption to the user. Just piling a bunch of stuff on a single server is nuts, since you create a massive point of failure.



> This becomes even MORE critical where storage is concerned. If an array loses enough drive modules to go offline, now you're talking about the failure of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of machines, with little to no hope for recovery. You are now out of business.


Yeah, you've got to have backups.



> Incorrect, read my prior post. 3.5" drives have long since gone the way of the dodo in the server market. I bought my last server with 3.5" drives seven years ago, the 100+ since then have all been set up for 2.5". As I said previously, there are no blade servers (which currently dominate the market) that use 3.5" drives. Here is HP's current rack server lineup. While there may be a model or two that has the option of 3.5" drives, none are obvious at first glance. Likewise for Dell, and  Cisco. Lenovo actually shows ONE model with 3.5" drives, but all the rest have 2.5"


Weird. Seems like a dumb move to me. Why would blade servers even have hard drives? Wouldn't they work off of an iSCSI SAN or something, and just have their own OS locally? With the SAN having a ton of 3.5" drives?



> It's not as far off as you may think. Except for some 6-year old firewalls with 160GB drives that were recently replaced, I haven't had a single spinning platter in my primary datacenter for almost three years.


If you don't have a huge volume of data to store, then maybe it makes sense, but what sort of business doesn't have a crapton of stuff to store? There has to be some deep storage somewhere, even if the most used stuff goes all to flash.



> You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but it's apparent that Tivo disagrees with you. They obviously chose the marginally more expensive 2.5" drives for a reason. My guess is space, power, and cooling. iFixit will probably answer that question for us in the coming days.


They let function follow form. They forgot the golden rule of form follows function.



Kremlar said:


> I think you are confusing failover clustering and virtualization. Most small to medium size businesses are not using failover clustering, but just about all (at least the ones I work with) are virtualizing. Even if they you were using failover clustering it's not an excuse to use hardware not suited for the task. It's irresponsible and foolish.


Who would be crazy enough to virtualize without a failsafe cluster? Isn't that one of the big selling points of virtualization, along with having to have and power a lot less hardware?


----------



## Bigg

I was looking through Dell's server site, and it seems like they have a hodge-podge of 2.5" and 3.5", specifically siting 2.5" for performance. I guess they significantly more than compensate for the 2.5" drives' inherent slowness by having way more of them in a RAID array in the same amount of rack space?


----------



## b_scott

HarperVision said:


> So how do you explain the "Phablet" craze? These so called "phones" are getting HUGE!


bigger area but still thinner. They are useful for more things so they're really more of a tablet replacement in some ways.


----------



## geko29

Bigg said:


> Well, yeah, if you're putting a bunch of virtualized servers on one single piece of hardware with a single piece of failure, than yeah, you're setting yourself up for disaster. I was referring to virtualization like VMWare ESXi or similar product where you've got a bunch of physical servers handling far more virtual servers, so that if one physical server goes offline, another server, possibly in another physical location, picks up the slack with no disruption to the user. Just piling a bunch of stuff on a single server is nuts, since you create a massive point of failure.


That's exactly what I was referring to--I have 20 ESXi hosts in 3 clusters running 700 VMs across two datacenters (this is a VERY small deployment, btw, in the grand scheme of things). But even in a cluster, when a host fails, so does EVERYTHING running on it. In my case, that means 50+ VMs just crash, and have to be restarted on other hosts. They don't just keep running through some sort of magic. There is no "pick up the slack with no disruption to the user". It doesn't work that way.



Bigg said:


> Weird. Seems like a dumb move to me. Why would blade servers even have hard drives? Wouldn't they work off of an iSCSI SAN or something, and just have their own OS locally? With the SAN having a ton of 3.5" drives?


You contradict yourself here. If the server has no local storage, how does it have a locally-installed OS? FWIW, mine actually don't have local storage (they have blanks installed in the two 2.5" bays). Instead, they boot from (Fiber Channel) SAN. But as with servers, 3.5" drives are essentially dead for SAN use, except for two use cases:

1. Extremely cheap, low-end arrays. Things like 45Drives. Even Equallogic has switched to 2.5" drives for all but their very lowest tier
2. Bulk (Tier 3) storage of large quantities of data where performance doesn't matter, within an array that has 2.5" drives as Tier 2/1 and SSD as Tier 1/0

The reason for this is simple: performance. 3.5" NL-SAS drives can service about 80 IOPS each, and you can fit 12 in a 2U cabinet. 2.5" SAS drives do around 200 IOPS each, and you can fit 24 in that same size cabinet. So the cabinet of 2.5" drives is literally 5x faster than the one with 3.5" drives.



Bigg said:


> If you don't have a huge volume of data to store, then maybe it makes sense, but what sort of business doesn't have a crapton of stuff to store? There has to be some deep storage somewhere, even if the most used stuff goes all to flash.


Now you're coming around. This is indeed the niche that 3.5" drives are filling in enterprise--high volume storage where read/write performance is of no concern. Things like archival of old data that no one uses anymore. I use them for database backups--one of the things near-line drives are good at is large, sequential writes. But those are things that are written once, and are almost always deleted before being read back. You'd be a fool (or just unbelievably cheap) to put VMs or any hot/warm data on such an array. The performance for random reads/writes is just awful.


----------



## Kremlar

> Who would be crazy enough to virtualize without a failsafe cluster? Isn't that one of the big selling points of virtualization, along with having to have and power a lot less hardware?


Business who can't afford a failover cluster. Small to medium size businesses who were not virtualizing before, but are now because it's a no-brainer - even if you only have a few server instances.

It's not crazy, it's smart to virtualize just about everything now.


----------



## moyekj

Kremlar said:


> It's not crazy, it's smart to virtualize just about everything now.


 I have to fight IT like crazy to NOT attempt to virtualize. For cases when you need highest possible performance we have testscases showing VMWare virtualization slows things down almost 50% compared to bare metal for multi-threaded Spice simulation. Only after we ran those tests did we manage to convince IT that virtualizing is not a good idea in all cases, and in fact a terrible idea in this particular use model.


----------



## Kremlar

> I have to fight IT like crazy to NOT attempt to virtualize. For cases when you need highest possible performance we have testscases showing VMWare virtualization slows things down almost 50% compared to bare metal for multi-threaded Spice simulation. Only after we ran those tests did we manage to convince IT that virtualizing is not a good idea in all cases, and in fact a terrible idea in this particular use model.


Right, there are some scenarios where it just doesn't make sense. At one location I have a SQL server that was very high-end a couple years ago. Some want to virtualize it, but there would likely be a performance degredation with even today's top of the line hardware so it just doesn't make sense performance-wise at this time.


----------



## Bigg

geko29 said:


> That's exactly what I was referring to--I have 20 ESXi hosts in 3 clusters running 700 VMs across two datacenters (this is a VERY small deployment, btw, in the grand scheme of things). But even in a cluster, when a host fails, so does EVERYTHING running on it. In my case, that means 50+ VMs just crash, and have to be restarted on other hosts. They don't just keep running through some sort of magic. There is no "pick up the slack with no disruption to the user". It doesn't work that way.


I know there are systems out there that can seamlessly mirror and failover without interrupting whatever is going on. That's one of the big advantages of VMs.



> You contradict yourself here. If the server has no local storage, how does it have a locally-installed OS? FWIW, mine actually don't have local storage (they have blanks installed in the two 2.5" bays). Instead, they boot from (Fiber Channel) SAN. But as with servers, 3.5" drives are essentially dead for SAN use, except for two use cases:
> 
> 1. Extremely cheap, low-end arrays. Things like 45Drives. Even Equallogic has switched to 2.5" drives for all but their very lowest tier
> 2. Bulk (Tier 3) storage of large quantities of data where performance doesn't matter, within an array that has 2.5" drives as Tier 2/1 and SSD as Tier 1/0
> 
> The reason for this is simple: performance. 3.5" NL-SAS drives can service about 80 IOPS each, and you can fit 12 in a 2U cabinet. 2.5" SAS drives do around 200 IOPS each, and you can fit 24 in that same size cabinet. So the cabinet of 2.5" drives is literally 5x faster than the one with 3.5" drives.


I meant local storage of data. They have to have a small amount of local storage if they have a locally bootable OS.

For bulk storage (of which there is a LOT), why would you have 2.5" drives and SSDs? If it's really bulk storage, you should be able to access it directly off of 3.5" drives.

Are you assuming 7200RPM 3.5" vs. 7200RPM 2.5" drives? That seems like a bit of an unfair comparison. I'd see a 5400RPM 2.5" as equivalent to a 7200RPM 3.5" drive, and a 7200RPM 2.5" to a 10k or 15k 3.5" (do they even make 15 drives anymore? I remember back in the day before SSDs guys putting 15k SCSI drives in desktops, but they would whine like hell).

What then would fall in this sort of middleground? If you need bulk storage, you're in 3.5" territory, who cares about IOPS, if you're looking for a small amount of high-IOPS storage, you want an SSD. So what falls in the crack between those two?



> Now you're coming around. This is indeed the niche that 3.5" drives are filling in enterprise--high volume storage where read/write performance is of no concern. Things like archival of old data that no one uses anymore. I use them for database backups--one of the things near-line drives are good at is large, sequential writes. But those are things that are written once, and are almost always deleted before being read back. You'd be a fool (or just unbelievably cheap) to put VMs or any hot/warm data on such an array. The performance for random reads/writes is just awful.


So then aren't 2.5" drives just about on the edge of being killed off by SSDs, and 3.5" drives will live on for a while doing deep storage, where there isn't a lot of access? Wouldn't VMs in the server world behave a lot better on SSDs? I know on the desktop side, VMs are almost unusable on an HDD, but they really fly on an SSD, since they pound the crap out of storage in terms of IOPS when combined with the host OS.

Couldn't there be databases and fileservers that use large arrays of 3.5" drives, because there is a crapton of stuff on them that people need available online, but don't actually have enough simultaneous users at any one given time to have performance issues?

That doesn't really seem like a niche, considering how much crap is out there that needs to be stored these days.

Also, TiVo sounds a lot like that 3.5" application- a crapton of data with few simultaneous users with relatively little demand on IOPS, and moderate demand on sequential read/write, even maxed out with 6 streams in and 4 or 5 streams out or whatever the modern boxes can do. Sounds like TiVo should have stuck with the 3.5" drive.


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## b_scott

Bigg said:


> Sounds like TiVo should have stuck with the 3.5" drive.


/long story short = but it wouldn't look as pretty.


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## jonw747

geko29 said:


> Incorrect, read my prior post. 3.5" drives have long since gone the way of the dodo in the server market. I bought my last server with 3.5" drives seven years ago, the 100+ since then have all been set up for 2.5". As I said previously, there are no blade servers (which currently dominate the market) that use 3.5" drives.


Not everybody in the server market uses off-the-shelf blade servers:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

Admittedly they are a backup storage company.


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## geko29

Bigg said:


> I know there are systems out there that can seamlessly mirror and failover without interrupting whatever is going on. That's one of the big advantages of VMs.


Sure things like Vmware FT (Fault Tolerance) exist, but are not widely used, because of the substantial limitations:

1. Limited number of protected VMs per host (can't protect everything you care about)
2. More than double the resource utilization
3. Lower performance due to latency introduced by the logging
4. Severe limitations on VM resources (only one vcpu prior to 6.0, now up to 4)

With the end result being you can't use FT to protect the VMs you care about most--Databases and high-volume application servers. So why use it at all?



Bigg said:


> Are you assuming 7200RPM 3.5" vs. 7200RPM 2.5" drives? That seems like a bit of an unfair comparison. I'd see a 5400RPM 2.5" as equivalent to a 7200RPM 3.5" drive, and a 7200RPM 2.5" to a 10k or 15k 3.5" (do they even make 15 drives anymore? I remember back in the day before SSDs guys putting 15k SCSI drives in desktops, but they would whine like hell).


Of course I'm not comparing 7200 to 7200. I'm comparing 7200rpm 3.5" drives vs. 10k and 15k 2.5" drives. Because those are the primary units available in the marketplace. 15k 3.5" drives disappeared from the market a long time ago because they were too expensive to produce--the last time I had to buy a 15k 3.5" drive (6 years ago), it was $1350 for 300GB. Around that same time I was getting 10k 2.5" drives of the same capacity for $500. 10k drives are on their way out in the 3.5" formfactor too, though they are still available



Bigg said:


> What then would fall in this sort of middleground? If you need bulk storage, you're in 3.5" territory, who cares about IOPS, if you're looking for a small amount of high-IOPS storage, you want an SSD. So what falls in the crack between those two?
> 
> So then aren't 2.5" drives just about on the edge of being killed off by SSDs, and 3.5" drives will live on for a while doing deep storage, where there isn't a lot of access? Wouldn't VMs in the server world behave a lot better on SSDs? I know on the desktop side, VMs are almost unusable on an HDD, but they really fly on an SSD, since they pound the crap out of storage in terms of IOPS when combined with the host OS.


Bulk file storage is going to go to the cloud. You simply can't beat the pricing on Amazon Glacier, compared to the capital expense, space, power, cooling, maintenance and administration costs of hosting it locally.

The "middleground", as you put it, is VMs that need to run and run fairly well on shared storage, but where the organization has decided they don't warrant the expense of SSD. They have to live somewhere, and no sysadmin that wants to continue receiving a paycheck would dare put them on an array of 7200rpm 3.5" NL-SAS drives. Another word for "middleground" in this context would be "mainstream".

As you correctly note, VM performance is abysmal on a single 5400rpm drive, which can do about 40 IOPS. It only gets worse when you have hundreds sharing a few dozen 7200rpm drives. And while yes, you WANT SSD for all your VMs, that doesn't necessarily translate to your executives being willing to write the big checks necessary to make that happen. So, as in many things, you prioritize. The most important VMs go on Tier 0/SSD, the next tranche go on Tier 1, etc.

The other major use case that's exploding lately is big data, where the volume of information is so huge that SSD is unaffordable, but it gets accessed too frequently to live on slower storage. This is where things like Hadoop clusters fall. Petabytes upon petabytes of data, living on local storage (usually 10k 2.5" drives) in dozens or hundreds of interconnected servers.



jonw747 said:


> Not everybody in the server market uses off-the-shelf blade servers:
> 
> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/
> 
> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/
> 
> Admittedly they are a backup storage company.


Yup, and backup--especially cloud backup--is where "cheap and deep" rules the roost. No contradiction there at all.

But we've digressed too far from the topic at hand, so I think this will be my last post on enterprise storage.


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## randian

geko29 said:


> Bulk file storage is going to go to the cloud. You simply can't beat the pricing on Amazon Glacier, compared to the capital expense, space, power, cooling, maintenance and administration costs of hosting it locally.


Are you sure? If you have a substantial dataset (for example the 10TB of media I have) that's $100/month in Glacier fees, the restore is astronomically expensive and the upload impossible in any reasonable timeframe, and you still need a local copy. A ZFS RaidZ3 DIY box starts looking mighty attractive at $1200+/year.


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## jonw747

randian said:


> Are you sure? If you have a substantial dataset (for example the 10TB of media I have) that's $100/month in Glacier fees, the restore is astronomically expensive and the upload impossible in any reasonable timeframe, and you still need a local copy. A ZFS RaidZ3 DIY box starts looking mighty attractive at $1200+/year.


I suppose that depends whether you have to hire somebody to baby sit it. A hobbyist never bothers to include their own time in a cost calculation.


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## Bigg

b_scott said:


> /long story short = but it wouldn't look as pretty.


Pretty much. They forgot Form Follows Function.



geko29 said:


> Sure things like Vmware FT (Fault Tolerance) exist, but are not widely used, because of the substantial limitations:
> 
> 1. Limited number of protected VMs per host (can't protect everything you care about)
> 2. More than double the resource utilization
> 3. Lower performance due to latency introduced by the logging
> 4. Severe limitations on VM resources (only one vcpu prior to 6.0, now up to 4)
> 
> With the end result being you can't use FT to protect the VMs you care about most--Databases and high-volume application servers. So why use it at all?


I've heard of a lot of companies using it for everything so that they don't have server outages.



> Of course I'm not comparing 7200 to 7200. I'm comparing 7200rpm 3.5" drives vs. 10k and 15k 2.5" drives.


That's even less fair. Those are some exotic drives.



> The "middleground", as you put it, is VMs that need to run and run fairly well on shared storage, but where the organization has decided they don't warrant the expense of SSD. They have to live somewhere, and no sysadmin that wants to continue receiving a paycheck would dare put them on an array of 7200rpm 3.5" NL-SAS drives. Another word for "middleground" in this context would be "mainstream".


I would see it as a narrow niche in the middle, which is basically on borrowed time. Solid state will get cheaper and take over everything except the bulk data storage, which is on 2.5" drives anyway.



> As you correctly note, VM performance is abysmal on a single 5400rpm drive, which can do about 40 IOPS. It only gets worse when you have hundreds sharing a few dozen 7200rpm drives.


I shudder to even think about that. Just one host OS and one VM on a regular 2.5" drive is slow as molasses. Lightning fast on even a cheapo SSD off of Newegg.



> The other major use case that's exploding lately is big data, where the volume of information is so huge that SSD is unaffordable, but it gets accessed too frequently to live on slower storage. This is where things like Hadoop clusters fall. Petabytes upon petabytes of data, living on local storage (usually 10k 2.5" drives) in dozens or hundreds of interconnected servers.


That's a relatively niche case, and even then, SSDs will soon come down in price, to where the currently in use dataset can be loaded onto SSDs to do something with it.



geko29 said:


> But we've digressed too far from the topic at hand, so I think this will be my last post on enterprise storage.


Hah. So to tie it back together, has anyone figured out how Comcast's Cloud DVR system works? It seems like a giant mystery.



randian said:


> Are you sure? If you have a substantial dataset (for example the 10TB of media I have) that's $100/month in Glacier fees, the restore is astronomically expensive and the upload impossible in any reasonable timeframe, and you still need a local copy. A ZFS RaidZ3 DIY box starts looking mighty attractive at $1200+/year.


That would be a lot higher for a business. They're not trying to compete with some guy running a datacenter in his closet. That's an impossible market to compete with.


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## TIVO_GUY_HERE

andyw715 said:


> Once you un-marry it from your Premiere, any recordings that happened after the original marry process will not be accessible (since the recordings are striped over both drives.
> 
> Marrying to the Bolt should format the external so the Bolt can append that space to its internal drive resulting in what it thinks is a larger single drive.


Thanks.

I don't have issue with it losing the programs on the premiere, I've already transferred what I want to the bolt, so the premiere will just be a backup, and I can add the drive to the bolt, and let it wipe/marry it.


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## southerndoc

Has anyone had any experience with using enterprise grade server drives for reliability? My hard disks fail on average every 3 years in my TiVo's. Curious how well an enterprise drive would stand up.


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## M3 Adjuster

geekmedic said:


> Has anyone had any experience with using enterprise grade server drives for reliability? My hard disks fail on average every 3 years in my TiVo's. Curious how well an enterprise drive would stand up.


If you are continually having drives fail that rapidly... have you confirmed that the electronics are getting good, clean, power?

I have owned 4 tivos from Directivo thru Series 3HD since 1999 and only had one hard drive fail. IIRC the one that failed was a Maxtor and I use WD drives for upgrading space. I have always either begun with or upgraded to lifetime service on each unit and I have had very good success.

I currently have two HD Series 3 models and about 5 months ago had my bedroom Tivo completely die. ugh.. so I guess I only have one now.. LOL.. This is the first one of the 4 that has completely failed. It does not have any sort of surge protection or line conditioning however, unlike the living unit.

In my living room HT system, I use a Panamax line conditioner, and I also have my cable routed through the line conditioner. :up:

Good luck!


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## geko29

geekmedic said:


> Has anyone had any experience with using enterprise grade server drives for reliability? My hard disks fail on average every 3 years in my TiVo's. Curious how well an enterprise drive would stand up.


I think you might have trouble finding them. Enterprise SATA drives used to be common at the low end of the storage spectrum, but they've been largely displaced by NearLine-SAS. Performance is in the same ballpark (and reliability has actually been better, in my experience), but the connector and signaling are different.


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## krkaufman

Where are we on confirmation of what 2.5" drives are working (and working well) in the BOLT? Is anyone keeping a list of compatible drives?


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## gigaguy

I also would like a list of drives that have worked, esp 2-3tb ones that need no Windows formatting.


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## beezerSD

Until today, I didn't know that you can't "harvest" the 2.5 inch drive from a WD My Passport. The bare drive inside doesn't have a SATA connection on it, only a USB. It's really too bad since Frys has a 3tb My Passport for $128.


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## HerronScott

geekmedic said:


> Has anyone had any experience with using enterprise grade server drives for reliability? My hard disks fail on average every 3 years in my TiVo's. Curious how well an enterprise drive would stand up.


I would also wonder if there was some external factor if this was occurring multiple times. With my S1's and S3's, I've yet to have a drive fail. The S1's were 5+ and 7+ years and still running when replaced by the S3's. The original S3 drives were still fine after almost 3 years when I replaced them with 1TB drives and the 1TB drives were fine after 6 years when I upgraded them to 2TB drives for more space.

Scott


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## HarperVision

Here is a WD drive for pretty cheap at $69 for 2TB if the drive can be harvested for the Bolt:

http://www.rakuten.com/prod/wd-my-p...&rmatt=tsid:1012038|cid:4438|cgid:44383068684


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## Kremlar

> Here is a WD drive for pretty cheap at $69 for 2TB if the drive can be harvested for the Bolt:


I believe a lot of the WD drives have USB connectors soldered right into the drive electronics.


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## georgeorwell86

Just out of curiosity...is it possible to clone a Tivo drive? For example, if I have a 2TB drive now...but want to later upgrade to a 3TB.....can you use cloning software to do this.....or does the way Tivo preps the drive prevent this from being possible?


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## AgWillow

I've just started using a Bolt and was thinking about replacing the HD with something larger per the discussion and instructions elsewhere on this forum. Losing the few shows I've recorded isn't an issue -- I use it mostly for time-shifting -- but I wonder what effect the replacement would have on my CableCard activation. Specifically, might there be something on the disk that ties the CableCard to that box?


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## ggieseke

AgWillow said:


> I've just started using a Bolt and was thinking about replacing the HD with something larger per the discussion and instructions elsewhere on this forum. Losing the few shows I've recorded isn't an issue -- I use it mostly for time-shifting -- but I wonder what effect the replacement would have on my CableCard activation. Specifically, might there be something on the disk that ties the CableCard to that box?


You will almost certainly have to re-pair the CableCARD.


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## krkaufman

georgeorwell86 said:


> Just out of curiosity...is it possible to clone a Tivo drive? For example, if I have a 2TB drive now...but want to later upgrade to a 3TB.....can you use cloning software to do this.....or does the way Tivo preps the drive prevent this from being possible?


I don't know if they use the term "clone," specifically, but you may be looking for MFS Tools 3.2, here:
http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=529148​Doubleplusgood!?


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## aaronwt

AgWillow said:


> I've just started using a Bolt and was thinking about replacing the HD with something larger per the discussion and instructions elsewhere on this forum. Losing the few shows I've recorded isn't an issue -- I use it mostly for time-shifting -- but I wonder what effect the replacement would have on my CableCard activation. Specifically, might there be something on the disk that ties the CableCard to that box?


I've replaced the drive in four separate Bolts. I had to repair the cable card with each one.


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## krkaufman

aaronwt said:


> I've replaced the drive in four separate Bolts. I had to repair the cable card with each one.


Chuckle. I was initially thinking, "Good golly, what approach did you take to opening that thing that you damaged the CableCARD?"


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