# help with upgrade



## ad_jack (Jul 20, 2007)

At the moment i have a bog standard tivo and it is starting to get a bit slow at times aswell as hd becoming full. Am planning to purchase a cachcard to speed things up. I would also be interested in a drive upgrade. But the whole process is a little confusing to me.

I will most likely buy a drive and cachcard together so that cachcard drivers are already on hd and can simply drop them both straight into TiVo with no hassles. 

I see the Samsung HA250JC 250gb drive is the most popular as its quiter and spins slower making for a cooler internal temperature. But i preferable want 400gb minimum and dont really want to add 2 hds. Im terified of TiVo overheating and dying and the reason ive taken so long to finally pluck up the courage to upgrade

also all this mode 0 and TiVo's software versions goes straight over my head. i'm not very good with command line and things like this. 

Any help and information for an upgrade newbie would be greatly appreciated 

Adam


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Hi Adam 

The HA250JC is a very popular drive for exactly the reasons you stated, and it's also extremely quiet too 

On the whole, a single large drive is preferable to two smaller drives for reasons of noise, heat and reliability, but when you're talking about 500gb then the benefits of the HA250JC tend to outweigh those considerations somewhat. The HA250JC is by far the most reliable drive I have ever sold for TiVo use and two HA250JCs don't generate much more heat than a single 400gb (7200rpm) drive and will also normally be quieter, so the likelihood of your TiVo going up in flames as a result of fitting them is exceedingly low! I've had many customers who have fitted two 400gb Seagate drives (which are a *lot* hotter than an HA250JC) and they are still running fine after a couple of years.

I would suggest though, that if you're upgrading to two drives and a cachecard with RAM it would be sensible to replace the PSU at the same time, as they do degrade with age and the originals are getting pretty old now!

The use of Mode 0 (which can be installed at the same time as the cachecard drivers) does not increase the heat generated within the TiVo IME and can be switched off easily anyway if you get your upgrade from the 'right' supplier...


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

Tivo has fairly good cooling, so overheating is never a problem really.

Mode0/quality: 

Press aux repeatedly when on live-tv - that switches alternately between tivo best quality 
and the original unaltered source. 
If you can easily see the difference (pixellated tivo), then mode0 is for you.
This is much more noticeable on LCDs than CRTs

Noise:

Note the original 40GB (or 15+30GB) drives are much noisier than any modern drives anyway... they can often develop a louder whine as they get older too.

If you buy preconfigured drives from any of the suppliers (  ) then all you'll have to do it open the tivo box, and replace your old drive with the new one. No configuration at all needed. 

Some suppliers will even do the install, and transfer your recordings and season passes too if you send the whole tivo to them.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

mikerr said:


> Some suppliers will even do the install, and transfer your recordings and season passes too if you send the whole tivo to them.


Yes they will 

I see your  and raise you a  .....


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## ad_jack (Jul 20, 2007)

I think i will stick to the single drive (i have a terible track record for electrical equipment). I think 400gb will be adaquite, i was more concerned about noise and overheating but seeings as people are using 2 400gb HDs there is obviously no worries using just the one. 

Oh i see, Mode 0 is something to do with recording quality. As i dont have LCD there isnt much point especially when im upgrading HD size so that i can set High Quality as default with plenty room to spare

i was thinking about a replacement psu simply to have one here should my existing one die plus i know that if i start fiddling, the one thing i dont have a replacement for will go and i'll be TiVo-less for a few days  Wots £29 when im alreading planning a spree of over £250 on the ol' girl 

I did email you this week blindlemon concerning drive/cachcard upgrade and the stock levels of glo remotes via your site, with prompt reply i might add. no doubt you will be getting an order from me soon  as you seem to be the best value, that i have seen anyway. 

Thanks to all for advice :up:


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## ad_jack (Jul 20, 2007)

mikerr said:


> Some suppliers will even do the install, and transfer your recordings and season passes too if you send the whole tivo to them.


I'm assuming this transfer can be done if i send only my drive when i place the order?? roughly what would be the turnaround if i were to send in my existing drive for a recording/SP transfer? would be nice to keep previous recordings


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

ad_jack said:


> Oh i see, Mode 0 is something to do with recording quality. As i dont have LCD there isnt much point especially when im upgrading HD size so that i can set High Quality as default with plenty room to spare


Mode 0 will give you a better quality picture on any TV, but is most noticeable with LCDs and TVs > 28". However, if you are happy with picture quality as it is then Mode 0 is probably not going to be a big benefit for you.



ad_jack said:


> I'm assuming this transfer can be done if i send only my drive when i place the order?? roughly what would be the turnaround if i were to send in my existing drive for a recording/SP transfer?


Assuming you have a standard drive setup at the moment (ie. 40gb or 30gb+15gb) then the copy itself will take 3-4 hours if there are no disc errors. So with Special Delivery shipping both ways, avoiding weekends, if you post it on a Monday, you should have the upgrade by Thursday.

Of course I can only speak for myself here....


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

Yes, it only needs the drive(s), not the whole tivo just for a recordings/SP transfer.
A transfer can take a few hours, so they run overnight which increases turnaround by a day.

[edit] beaten by 1 minute again


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Both www.tivocentral.co.uk (mikerr) and www.tivoheaven.co.uk (blindlemon) can I believe provide all the services you have indicated you require.

If you only want a single drive but lots of capacity then the Western Digital Green Power 1000Gb SATA drive can be installed in a Tivo using an IDE to SATA converter that plugs in to the IDE hard drive lead.

I believe www.tivocentral.co.uk is already selling or at least testing these drives in a Tivo, although I suspect that as an apparent Samsung shareholder www.tivoheaven.co.uk will probably bang the Samsung HA250JC drum till the very last items of old stock in the UK (or indeed the world)disappear. 

The Western Digital Green Power drive has very low power consumption and noise and works out a lot cheaper per Gb than the Samsung HA250JC if you want monster capacity.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> As an apparent Samsung shareholder www.tivoheaven.co.uk will probably bang the Samsung HA250JC drum till the very last items of old stock in the UK (or indeed the world)disappear.


/banging drum, slowly.... 



Pete77 said:


> The Western Digital Green Power drive has very low power consumption and noise and works out a lot cheaper per Gb than the Samsung HA250JC if you want monster capacity.


Based on your own calculation here and taking into account the 5W power consumption of a cachecard+RAM which you calculated earlier but then conveniently omitted in the linked post, I'd say that would save about £8.76 per year - not exactly much to get worked up about ...for most of us


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

Who's selectively quoting now ? 


pete77 said:


> works out a lot cheaper per Gb


 not just _cheaper to run_

Based on retail prices of bare drives, Samsung HA250JC 250GB is almost twice the price per GB of both the WD "green power" WD10EACS 1000GB and Samsung HD400LD

The WD and 400Gb samsungs are actually the same price per GB when I buy them.

I have personally moved all my own PCs and tivos over to WD 1TB drives,
but am slightly reticent of selling a drive with a sata convertor for tivos
... its less of a drop in replacement than an IDE with the convertor and wiring.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> I'd say that would save about £8.76 per year - not exactly much to get worked up about ...for most of us


What about a 1TB Western Digital drive only costing about the same to buy as 2 x 250GB Samsung HA250JCs though?

You have always been one of the noisiest in this forum on the subject of two hard drives being less reliable than one (double the rate of failure inherently and then exacerbated by extra heat caused by having two hard drives in one Tivo box) so surely a drive which can provide double the capacity of two Samsung HA250JCs on one exceptionally quiet single drive must fulfil nearly all of your own criteria for hard drive selection?

If you are honest you will surely admit that your preferred solution is for only one Samsung HA250JC and that means only a quarter of the capacity of the single drive Western Digital Green Power 1TB drive.


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## ad_jack (Jul 20, 2007)

Pete77 said:


> If you only want a single drive but lots of capacity then the Western Digital Green Power 1000Gb SATA drive can be installed in a Tivo using an IDE to SATA converter that plugs in to the IDE hard drive lead.


Ridiculous! 1TB in TiVo. The gluttonous side of me is starting to show his fat face. mmmhm 1TB


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

mikerr said:


> ... its less of a drop in replacement than an IDE with the convertor and wiring.


What aspect of fitting the IDE to SATA converter do you regard as being especially tricky for the end user?

Especially bearing in mind they already have to remove the Tivo case (not entitely easy for the DIY allergic) and unscrew and remove the bracket containing the hard drive and then remove the hard drive from that bracket and then replace and reinstall it.

Ditto fitting a Cachecard is not very straightforward for those who dislike DIY (removing a rubber foot and finding a way out of the case for the cable is required) but most of Tivoheaven's customers for Cachecards seem to manage to do this.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

ad_jack said:


> Ridiculous! 1TB in TiVo. The gluttonous side of me is starting to show his fat face. mmmhm 1TB


Around 350 hours at Best or similar with Mode 0 depending on the Bitrate used.

Banish the words "Insufficient Disk Space" to history.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

A terabyte in a Series 1 TiVo? Surely a case of "mine is bigger than yours"! How an earth would you find anything on a TiVo that size...


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

TCM2007 said:


> A terabyte in a Series 1 TiVo? Surely a case of "mine is bigger than yours"! How an earth would you find anything on a TiVo that size...


Same way as normal.

If you only want to look at the latest recordings you only have to as by default Tivo goes to the current Now Playing page. If you want to scroll back a year you can.

Also you can use mikerr's hack for the Now Playing interface to sort by program name and episode and his Tivoweb hack to play programs direct from a Tivoweb version of Now Playing.

This is not something standard Tivo users will know how to do I hear you cry. No need to worry a 1TB hard drive is not for them, it is for us Tivo geeks who want to run Tivoweb and a hacked version of the Tivo UI.


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

Pete77 said:


> Also you can use mikerr's hack for the Now Playing interface to sort by program name and episode and his Tivoweb hack to play programs direct from a Tivoweb version of Now Playing
> 
> *This is not something standard Tivo users will know how to do *I hear you cry.


It is if they get my sortnp hack already installed on their preconfigured 1TB drive 

The 2x400Gb samsung config has been around a while.. no-one said that was "way too big".
A single 1Tb drive is only slightly bigger than that, but gives the advantages of a single drive with less heat and noise (and arguably more reliability vs 2 drives).


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

mikerr said:


> It is if they get my sortnp hack already installed on their preconfigured 1TB drive


And of course this would not be available from a certain other prepared Tivo hard drive upgrade supplier due to copyright restrictions on the distribution of the software (i.e. not permitted for commercial resale by anyone other than the author).



> The 2x400Gb samsung config has been around a while.. no-one said that was "way too big". A single 1Tb drive is only slightly bigger than that, but gives the advantages of a single drive with less heat and noise (and arguably more reliability vs 2 drives).


But when will somebody work out how to fit a doubled IDE to SATA adaptation to permit 2GB of hard dirve capacity.

Having said that I'm perfectly sure that a single 2TB drive will be on offer from Western Digital and other suppliers within the next 12 to 18 months.......


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

Pete77 said:


> [ mikerr's sort now playing hack ]
> And of course this would not be available from a certain other prepared Tivo hard drive upgrade supplier due to copyright restrictions on the distribution of the software (i.e. not permitted for commercial resale by anyone other than the author).


Actually, I don't restrict any of my hacks' distribution at all.
"Other suppliers" are welcome to pre-install them *for free*



Pete77 said:


> But when will somebody work out how to fit a doubled IDE to SATA adaptation to permit 2GB of hard drive capacity.


I got one from a HK ebay seller.. only one socket works at a time  
Maybe mine is faulty though.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

mikerr said:


> Actually, I don't restrict any of my hacks' distribution at all.


I bet he wouldn't allow you to start redistributing Hooch free of charge to your customers though.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

Why do you keep trying to start fights between two other Forum members Pete? Rather trollish behaviour, don't you think?


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

I'm sure it is in the interest of potential Tivo upgraders to understand what each upgrading firm is able to offer them. I believe that is what is normally known as competition or market forces and I thought you were a man who always believed strongly in not interfering in the smooth operation of the marketplace?

By the way TCM I seem to recall that you do not permit Endpad to be installed by those who package it in software and other similar products sold for commercial gain.

Is that still your position as it would surely seem much better for Endpad to be professionally installed on pre-prepared hard drives sold to customers who do not own Cachecards or Turbonet cards than to simply deny Tivo users upgrading by that means the opportunity to benefit from your splendid Endpad hack at all?


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

Pete, anyone reading your posts can clearly see that you are just stirring it for your own amusement.

As for Endpad, I forbid its distribution _without permission_. Less combative souls than yourself have simply asked for it!


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> I bet he wouldn't allow you to start redistributing Hooch free of charge to your customers though.


Because I'm a monopolistic psycho-capitalist or whatever it was you called me! Nevertheless, I like to think I've made enough of a contribution (for free) to this forum to get away with a little mercenary activity on the side... 

Indeed, I seem to remember a couple of *very* long and tedious threads involving a certain member's upgrade to 2x Samsung HA250JCs and his subsequent traumatic struggle with the cable-ties on his PSU....


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