# Success Upgrading Bolt(+) with 4TB, 5TB + 2.5" Internal Drives?



## zombiephysicist

2 Questions:

I have seen a lot of people and threads having problems with 4TB 2.5" upgrades on their Bolt's here. I've only seen one long time poster that has a 4TB drive for quite a while without problem.

*(1) Have others here had success with upgrading their Bolt with a 4TB or larger 2.5" drive???*

I'm trying to see if any reasonable number of people have upgraded their Bolts beyond the 3TB Toshiba drive that seems to work well, and gauge if it's worth risking trying to upgrade to a 5TB seagate drive.

*(2) If you have had success, can you tell us roughly how long you've been running the upgraded drive, how full/hard you run it, and what formatting tool/version/instructions you used to set it up?*

Thanks so much for any help!


*Update 2022-07-22*
After about 18 months my friends drive got worn out and I decided to move to an SSD, detailed in this post:








Success Upgrading Bolt(+) with 4TB, 5TB + 2.5&quot...


I'm at around 18 months. 100% capacity now. Knock wood, no issues.




www.tivocommunity.com


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## tivobw

zombiephysicist said:


> 2 Questions:
> 
> I have seen a lot of people and threads having problems with 4TB 2.5" upgrades on their Bolt's here. I've only seen one long time poster that has a 4TB drive for quite a while without problem.
> 
> *(1) Have others here had success with upgrading their Bolt with a 4TB or larger 2.5" drive???*
> 
> I'm trying to see if any reasonable number of people have upgraded their Bolts beyond the 3TB Toshiba drive that seems to work well, and gauge if it's worth risking trying to upgrade to a 5TB seagate drive.
> 
> *(2) If you have had success, can you tell us roughly how long you've been running the upgraded drive, how full/hard you run it, and what formatting tool/version/instructions you used to set it up?*
> 
> Thanks so much for any help!


Hey zombiephysicist, I'm using a Tivo Bolt with a 4TB WD Red in an external enclosure. It works pretty well.

However, Tivo broke things last month when they upgraded software - it broke the SATA->eSATA connection to my external hard drive. You can check this post for how we fixed it (basically had to directly connect SATA->SATA). Latest Software Update Broke my Hard eSATA Drive Hack on Bolt

Here's the original upgrade I did: Bolt Drive for Upgrade and more details here: Bolt Drive for Upgrade

All in all I'm happy with it. I have another issue though with Tivo Bolts failing after about a year. I've had 2 Bolts (one a brand new one, another a refurbished unit from Tivo) that crapped out with the same problem (tuners start to fail) after a year. I posted to this thread to see if anyone else is having problems: Tivo Bolt - Crappy Tuners Keep Failing! Anyone else?

Let me know if you have any questions. Everything I did, I learned by others on this forum! It's a great place.


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## zombiephysicist

Thanks Tivobw! Yea, I've had such huge problems with external drives on past Tivo's that I shy away from that. I added a 5TB Seagate. The install was pretty straight forward and it seems to work and proves 799HD recording hours of capacity, but let's see how it does in the longer haul...

Some more details of that are here if anyone is interested:
#1056


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## tivobw

zombiephysicist said:


> Thanks Tivobw! Yea, I've had such huge problems with external drives on past Tivo's that I shy away from that. I added a 5TB Seagate. The install was pretty straight forward and it seems to work and proves 799HD recording hours of capacity, but let's see how it does in the longer haul...
> 
> Some more details of that are here if anyone is interested:
> #1056


Wow zombiephysicist a 5TB internal drive, I am jealous! Lots of storage and it is tucked away nice and neat inside the Bolt. I think it's much nicer when it's all tucked away nicely in a neat package.

I do have the external drive but it was rather cheap.. only about $130 for the WD RED 4TB drive and about $35 for the external enclosure, then another $7 for the 40inch SATA->SATA cable. One nice thing about the external enclosure by Rosewill is that it has a temperature sensor, so I get to geek out on how hot the drive is cooking! Wooo!


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## sfhub

zombiephysicist said:


> Thanks Tivobw! Yea, I've had such huge problems with external drives on past Tivo's that I shy away from that.


The external drive tivobw is talking about is not like the old expander drives that were joined to the internal drive. It is only external in the sense that it is using an external drive enclosure to supply power to the 3.5" drive. From the standpoint of the Bolt, it is actually an internal drive connected to the internal SATA port with a long SATA cable.


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## zombiephysicist

tivobw said:


> Wow zombiephysicist a 5TB internal drive, I am jealous! Lots of storage and it is tucked away nice and neat inside the Bolt. I think it's much nicer when it's all tucked away nicely in a neat package.
> 
> I do have the external drive but it was rather cheap.. only about $130 for the WD RED 4TB drive and about $35 for the external enclosure, then another $7 for the 40inch SATA->SATA cable. One nice thing about the external enclosure by Rosewill is that it has a temperature sensor, so I get to geek out on how hot the drive is cooking! Wooo!


 The 5 TB drive was actually relatively cheap. $130 on Amazon. That said, you're route maybe well better in that it may run much more cool and reliably. Knocking wood for you and for me!


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## zombiephysicist

Link on amazon for the 5tb drive:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LZP2B23/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1


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## sfhub

zombiephysicist said:


> Link on amazon for the 5tb drive:
> 
> https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LZP2B23/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1


Based on the reports on TCF about experiences with Seagate 2.5" SMR drives I would be hesitant to use that drive despite the nice price. Of course with any drive you may find drives that work fine and maybe the problem was with early versions of the SMR drives.


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## tivobw

zombiephysicist said:


> The 5 TB drive was actually relatively cheap. $130 on Amazon. That said, you're route maybe well better in that it may run much more cool and reliably. Knocking wood for you and for me!


Hope everything works out for you! I checked the link you shared and noted the 4TB version (Seagate STDR4000100) is the same drive I had before that failed on me. Here's my Seagate upgrade experience: Installed in January 2016, failed in September 2016 (4 blinking lights issue). 4TB 2.5" drive for Bolt

In September 2016 I moved to the external enclosure route, using the WD Red 4TB, connected from SATA on Tivo Bolt motherboard -> route through hole in case -> eSATA connection on Rosewill external enclosure. It was sweet!

Life was good again until... Tivo released a software update in August of this year which broke connectivity to the enclosure. Looked on here and saw others tried SATA->SATA connection and it worked. So I had to buy a 40inch SATA->SATA cable, and now I'm connected from SATA on Tivo Bolt motherboard -> SATA connection on WD Red 4TB drive in Rosewill enclosure. I had to take the rear cover off the Rosewill enclosure so I could access the SATA port on the drive, but it still stays cool and I have the drive hidden in the bottom rack of my media cabinet, so you can't see it anyway.

I hope Seagate has made some changes to this type of drive and it works well for you and others who use it. Based on what I went through (my wife was so angry she lost her recordings, ouch!) I don't think I would try that type of drive again. The scars are still too fresh.

I miss having the all-in-one setup through, that's for sure. Having the external drive is a little wonky, as it's more difficult to move around and you have a little added noise from the enclosure. Definitely not as elegant, but there was no way I was going to pay Tivo $499.99 for LESS storage (3TB Tivo Bolt+). Yes, I know the Bolt+ has 2 more tuners (6 instead of 4 in my Bolt), but those tuners come at a higher price. My out of pocket for my SuperBolt:

$199 Tivo Bolt

$130 WD Red 4TB 3.5" external HD
$35 Rosewill RX304-APU3-35B External Enclosure
$7 40-inch SATA->SATA cable
$5 for drill bits to drill hole in Tivo Bolt case  (to route SATA cable through)
Donation to ggieseke for his fantastic MSFR 

Total - $376 
So I saved $123.99, got another 1 TB of recording space, *but* I have 2 less tuners and some frustration and time invested in getting it working (manual upgrade, ordering all the parts, have an external enclosure, have to deal with Tivo's silly OS upgrade tricks which broke things for a while, dealing with Comcast to repair CableCARD). Is it worth the frustration and effort? Yeah, I think so. Hacking is fun.


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## zombiephysicist

Yea I read all those and have assumed there is a high chance of failure at some point. I still have the original 3TB drive that came with it, and I can swap back in if/when it fails. 

I really didn't want an external drive for a bunch of reasons (other failures in the past) so I'm done with externals, even if they are mounted as an integral through the ribbon. Sounds like a nice/clever solution.

My hope is that if it does fail, it will fail late enough by which time there might be a better more reliable and larger drive out there. Bleeding edge!


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## tivobw

zombiephysicist said:


> Yea I read all those and have assumed there is a high chance of failure at some point. I still have the original 3TB drive that came with it, and I can swap back in if/when it fails.
> 
> I really didn't want an external drive for a bunch of reasons (other failures in the past) so I'm done with externals, even if they are mounted as an integral through the ribbon. Sounds like a nice/clever solution.
> 
> My hope is that if it does fail, it will fail late enough by which time there might be a better more reliable and larger drive out there. Bleeding edge!


I hear that!


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## zombiephysicist

So just following up on my own thread. About 3 months of normal heavy use, and knock wood, the bolt + seems to be running ok. It's generally around 32% capacity, and regularly uses between 3-5 tuners to record things.

When the TiVo is not used, it gets put into standby mode.

From what I read I can expect problems to start around at the 6-9month range, if others experiences are common. We shall see.

A friend did the same upgrade a couple of weeks after I did. Same drive etc. So after 2.5 months he had some freezes and jitters yesterday, and just rebooted the machine and all seems fine today. His is at 70% capacity and regularly has 4-6tuners going. So more intense usage. 

Wonder how others are fairing with this experiment...


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## zombiephysicist

Just checking in. Still same heavy use. At the 5 month mark and it seems to be chugging along fine (knocking wood). Im up around 40% capacity these days. My friend's also still chucking and he is a crazy heavy user.


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## zombiephysicist

6months, around 50% capacity. Knockwood, still churning well.


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## zombiephysicist

9 months. Around 65% capacity. Knock wood, still going.


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## HerronScott

zombiephysicist said:


> 9 months. Around 65% capacity. Knock wood, still going.


Fingers crossed it passes 1 year for you. 

Scott


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## zombiephysicist

10 month. Around 75%. Knockwood, seems to still be going aok.

Every now and then some of the videos have pixelization hiccups. But then again that would happen on my old Roamio Pro as well. My guess is this happens when all 6 tuners record at once, and now there is less free space to write too, and the drive throughput is being saturated.


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## jlin

zombiephysicist said:


> Thanks Tivobw! Yea, I've had such huge problems with external drives on past Tivo's that I shy away from that. I added a 5TB Seagate. The install was pretty straight forward and it seems to work and proves 799HD recording hours of capacity, but let's see how it does in the longer haul...
> 
> Some more details of that are here if anyone is interested:
> #1056


How did you get the drive out of the external enclosure?


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## zombiephysicist

To be honest, I forget. I think I just looked up a youtube video on how to take apart that case and found one.


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## zombiephysicist

So were around the 11 month mark, 80% capacity. Fingers crossed to make it to the year mark.

One thing that is disappointing is that there seem to be no new 2.5" drives larger than 5TB out. On a perhaps positive note, I see 4tb SSD drives have dropped down to $999. Still too pricey but a major drop. I hope that 8/12TB drives come out soon and the price drops on those. It will solve the issue out right.

I guess the spinning disk makers dont want to invest anymore into spinning drives as prices drop on SSDs.


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## ggieseke

Intel's first 'ruler' SSD holds 32TB


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## zombiephysicist

I suspect those might be a touch pricey!


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## zombiephysicist

Welp, the year has passed and the drive is still working. 88% full now. Knock wood.


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## zombiephysicist

For those that have money to burn, this might be the real answer. 7.5TB drive for $1700

Micron 7680 GB Internal SSD - 2.5" - 5200 ECO - SATA 6Gb/s


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## Soapm

zombiephysicist said:


> For those that have money to burn, this might be the real answer. 7.5TB drive for $1700
> 
> Micron 7680 GB Internal SSD - 2.5" - 5200 ECO - SATA 6Gb/s


I remember the day I bought a 1.2 Gig Seagate drive, I loaded every floppy disc I had onto the drive and it was less than half full. I remember commenting, "there's no way to fill a gigabit drive..." Now look at us, drives are over 7.5 TB...


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## zombiephysicist

zombiephysicist said:


> For those that have money to burn, this might be the real answer. 7.5TB drive for $1700
> 
> Micron 7680 GB Internal SSD - 2.5" - 5200 ECO - SATA 6Gb/s


Yea sorry, not just a 'drive' but a 7.5TB SSD! I think there are 15TB SSDs out too, but those are around $25000.

Welcome to NextWarehouse.com

So the 7.5TB SSD at 1700 is a relative bargain!


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## Soapm

zombiephysicist said:


> Yea sorry, not just a 'drive' but a 7.5TB SSD! I think there are 15TB SSDs out too, but those are around $25000.
> 
> Welcome to NextWarehouse.com
> 
> So the 7.5TB SSD at 1700 is a relative bargain!


Being the first on the block to have one, priceless!


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## zombiephysicist

zombiephysicist said:


> For those that have money to burn, this might be the real answer. 7.5TB drive for $1700
> 
> Micron 7680 GB Internal SSD - 2.5" - 5200 ECO - SATA 6Gb/s


So this drive is now down under $1250. Still very pricey, but this starts to get close to a very real/good solution in terms of both capacity and speed.

Micron 5200 ECO MTFDDAK7T6TDC 7680 GB SATA 6Gb/s 2.5" Solid State Drive

Also, over 13 months, drive over 90% capacity. Knock wood, the 5TB seagate is still chugging along.


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## global_dev

zombiephysicist said:


> So were around the 11 month mark, 80% capacity. Fingers crossed to make it to the year mark.
> 
> One thing that is disappointing is that there seem to be no new 2.5" drives larger than 5TB out. On a perhaps positive note, I see 4tb SSD drives have dropped down to $999. Still too pricey but a major drop. I hope that 8/12TB drives come out soon and the price drops on those. It will solve the issue out right.
> 
> I guess the spinning disk makers dont want to invest anymore into spinning drives as prices drop on SSDs.


I just dropped in a 5TB seagate (I know about all the issues people are having last couple of weeks) this AM into a fresh Bolt (500GB) non-vox. It booted up fine w/ 21.8.3.RC2-USC-11-849 on the original drive and the popping in the 5.


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## Kishore

global_dev said:


> I just dropped in a 5TB seagate (I know about all the issues people are having last couple of weeks) this AM into a fresh Bolt (500GB) non-vox. It booted up fine w/ 21.8.3.RC2-USC-11-849 on the original drive and the popping in the 5.


Ahha- so no issue with seagate drive...points to something else is up then with WD 4TB drive


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## Anotherpyr

I wonder if Western Digital asked them to blacklist it since it’s not a drive sold in a TiVo or available to consumers.


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## shenders

I've had a Seagate 2.5" 5TB drive installed in my Bolt for 14 months now. The disk is 
Nearly full (3.1% free space). The Bolt is running TE3 (20.7.4.RC42-USC-11-849).

It's working fine so far, but I've always been a bit nervous about it - I've read the threads that say "SMR drives fail early in TiVos".

I'm tempted to pull the drive out and check the SMART info - reallocated sectors, CRC errors, etc. It might give me an early warning of problems. I can hook the disk to a computer running Linux and run "smartctl -a" to print the info, and my understanding is that the data on the disk will not be modified, so I should be able to return the drive to the Bolt without the Bolt detecting a change and reformatting it. Is this a correct assumption? Has anyone tried doing this?


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## zombiephysicist

I havent tried that.

Sounds cool, but I don't have any idea how the TiVo will react. Seems weird to me that the TiVo would try to nuke the drive, but I guess stranger things have happened.

BTW do you have the 4TB or the 5TB seagate?


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## multiple

I have 4 WD40NPZZ Bolts and 1 2TB SSD Bolt and each of them stopped working in the last couple weeks as the latest TE4 release has been installed. I have been able to revert back to TE3 and get the drives up and running again. I'm starting to see WD20 series drives are now starting to see the same issues. I think TiVo is systematically starting to disable non-standard drives.


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## global_dev

why wouldn’t the systematic disabling be more universal and automatic? isnt the system sending diagnostic info fairly often?


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## multiple

It is all speculation. My guess is that they have to test to make sure their changes don't affect good drives. If they are doing this, I expect it to come in batches. My 4 4TB WD drives stopped working about two to three weeks ago over a few days as the upgrades started happening. My 2TB SSD stopped working a month or two before that. I recently tried the SSD drive on the TE3 enabled Bolt and it now works. I then tried the SSD on the TE4 enabled Bolt and it failed. I have one Bolt with TE4 on a Toshiba 3TB drive and it is still working. I had an old 2TB WD drive and it does not work on TE4, but works on TE3.


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## zombiephysicist

multiple said:


> It is all speculation. My guess is that they have to test to make sure their changes don't affect good drives. If they are doing this, I expect it to come in batches. My 4 4TB WD drives stopped working about two to three weeks ago over a few days as the upgrades started happening. My 2TB SSD stopped working a month or two before that. I recently tried the SSD drive on the TE3 enabled Bolt and it now works. I then tried the SSD on the TE4 enabled Bolt and it failed. I have one Bolt with TE4 on a Toshiba 3TB drive and it is still working. I had an old 2TB WD drive and it does not work on TE4, but works on TE3.


Interesting. Knocking wood, but it seems from the very limited reports, that the 5TB seagate drives are holding up better. I'm over 15months now, over 90% capacity, high use. Knock wood.


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## global_dev

My 5tb is sitting at 27% full, but recordings are deleting. is that typical behavior?

My system info says: 
Recording capacity: 800 HD hours 
Free disk space: 583 HD hours

Does Mira delete recordings even if there is plenty of free disk space?


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## zombiephysicist

global_dev said:


> My 5tb is sitting at 27% full, but recordings are deleting. is that typical behavior?
> 
> My system info says:
> Recording capacity: 800 HD hours
> Free disk space: 583 HD hours
> 
> Does Mira delete recordings even if there is plenty of free disk space?


It depends on how you set the recordings. If you set the one pass to keep the newest 5 shows. then every time a new episode shows up, the 6th oldest show will be deleted. If you set up a one pass to never delete, then something is off, and nothing should delete while there is free space.


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## global_dev

global_dev said:


> I just dropped in a 5TB seagate (I know about all the issues people are having last couple of weeks) this AM into a fresh Bolt (500GB) non-vox. It booted up fine w/ 21.8.3.RC2-USC-11-849 on the original drive and the popping in the 5.


3 months. no issues yet.


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## zombiephysicist

I'm at around 18 months. 100% capacity now. Knock wood, no issues.


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## multiple

I've been using the 5TB on 3 Bolts now for about 2 months without any issues on TE4.


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## zombiephysicist

So an update. My 5TB drive is still working after 18 months. However, I upgraded a friend's 5TB at the same time and his just died.

I also think I found out why some people's drives die fast and some last longer. Stand by mode.

So if your TiVo is always on and never goes into standby mode, TiVO live is always recording 6 tuners 24/7 into a 30minute cache. That obviously pulverizes the drive.

My TiVo always goes into standby mode when I turn the TV off (the harmony remote does this automatically).

Things still record in standby mode, it just doesnt do the live tv 24/7 recording thing and also doesnt record suggestions. See here:








SSDs in TiVos/DVRs, Yes You Can Do It (was: 5TB Bolt...


Hi All: I'm about to upgrade my (already upgraded) 5TB bolt to a 7.68TB Micron SSD. If possible, I would like to get the shows off my current 5TB drive onto the 7.68TB SSD. I'm not sure what the best way to go about doing that and would like any suggestions. OPTION A: I think MFS Tools 3.2...




www.tivocommunity.com





I am upgrading my TiVo to an SSD, see this thread if interested: SSDs in TiVos, Yes You Can Do It (was: 5TB Bolt Drive to...

This article on SSDs got me thinking about standby mode being the answer to why some of the 4/5TB 2.5" drives die and some dont, as you can see, it is a significant factor in lowering life expectancy of an SSD drive:

Using SSDs in DVRs - in Koherence


> If you're using the Samsung 850 EVO, then you drive might last about six years. On the other hand, if you're using the SanDisk or WD Blue, then you should be good for 16 years.


Vs "always recording"
*



The "Always Recording" Workload

Click to expand...

*


> Now let's redo the math assuming that you have a TiVo-style live cache and a four tuner box. The live cache records 24/7, so with four tuners you're recording 96 hours/day, or 8x more than the 12 hours/day we were assuming previously.
> 
> At 96 hours/day, the Samsung 850 EVO now lasts a bit less than a year, and the SanDisk and WD Blue about 2 years. Most people would find this an unacceptably low lifespan.


So I think this "always recording" penalty also applies to spinning hard drives. In particular, 2.5" drives are not as robust as 3.5" enterprise level drives for such "always on" abuse.


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## global_dev

is buffer usage worse than spinup/down on a non-ssd?


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## zombiephysicist

global_dev said:


> is buffer usage worse than spinup/down on a non-ssd?


Not sure, but I suspect there will be low latency on an SSD. I think folks are right, that without TRIM you should expect 1/3 speed writes over time, but that is still faster than the 2.5" spinner, so it should be fine. Well at least in theory. Time will tell. Doing upgrade today! Fingers crossed!


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## zombiephysicist

Thanks guys. I tried the MFSTools 3.3. Made a USB thupmbstick, but my surfacebook wouldnt boot it, so I just gave up. I did install the SSD. MFS Formatter did it's job and it formatted the 7.68TB SSD out to over 7100MBs and resulted in well ever 1200 HD recording hours. 

So now we'll see how long it lasts.

Initial notes. The boot time etc isn't any faster. Which makes sense as I have come to realize, the Bolt has some kind of mini SD card boot device somewhere on it. The OS boots from that. So the only "speed up" the Bolt will gain might be when it's trying to get a listing of shows while it's heavily being written to. So I suspect in general, it should seem like the same speed.

The one benefit I did instantly feel was the lack of anxiety of moving the bolt around while it's working. Without a real spinning drive moving the bolt around is now anxiety free, no fear of a drive crash.

Anyway, let's see how long this puppy lasts.


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## RyanL

multiple said:


> I've been using the 5TB on 3 Bolts now for about 2 months without any issues on TE4.


Any issues yet? I've been running my 5TB Seagate SMR drive for 5 months but woke up to 4 flashing lights this Monday. Unplugged it and plugged it back in and it seemed to boot properly, but I'm not sure if the drive is on it's way out or not.


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## RyanL

zombiephysicist said:


> Not sure, but I suspect there will be low latency on an SSD. I think folks are right, that without TRIM you should expect 1/3 speed writes over time, but that is still faster than the 2.5" spinner, so it should be fine. Well at least in theory. Time will tell. Doing upgrade today! Fingers crossed!


Don't newer SSDs have hardware TRIM built in though? Previously I believe it was up to the OS to handle it. To what you were saying above about power saving options (wasn't going to quote that whole message) is that I believe there is a few different levels of power saving options and I had to set mine to low otherwise it would miss some recordings. Don't know how much this option really saves the drive from spinning though. Contemplated grabbing a 4TB Micron earlier in the summer for $300 (they were on sale for about $350 and eventually dropped to about $300 - thread was here). Grabbed myself 2 x 1TB Micron drives for a couple of PCs from that deal and have been happy with them. Anyway if you look at the post above I had 4 flashing lights on my Bolt (5tb Seagate SMR drive) the other day. Rebooted it and it seems fine, but now I'm a little worried. Not seeing any deals right now on any larger SSDs and not looking to spend a ton on it either so may be thinking about just grabbing the next deal I see on a 2tb one and getting one with a decent warranty such as 5 years (if your projected #s are correct above, I'll probably use it). I like having the extended size (hell I'm at 80% with the 5tb, but I'm sure a lot of it can be cleaned up). Maybe I'll consider a larger 3.5" drive but not really keen on the idea of an external enclosure. Maybe I'll figure out a way to mount it internally (move some things around like the fan) but then I would still need to find 12 volts for it. I may even think about throwing the guts from the Bolt into a little itx case or something. Who knows. Just ranting or whatever. Let me know how that SSD is doing though.


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## zombiephysicist

RyanL said:


> Any issues yet? I've been running my 5TB Seagate SMR drive for 5 months but woke up to 4 flashing lights this Monday. Unplugged it and plugged it back in and it seemed to boot properly, but I'm not sure if the drive is on it's way out or not.


So I'm no longer using the 5TB Seagate spinner. I was not experiencing problems but my friend was after about a year. The difference was he did not put his TiVo in any power saver mode. I regularly put my TiVo to sleep because that's what the harmony remote does. That said, I think if you just turn on even the lowest level of power saving (so it still records all your shows and records recommendations, but does NOT record all 6 tunes 24/7 in live cache) it will last for at least 2 or 3 years.

I'm currently doing this with an SSD and Im at around 6 months of use, so we'll see if my theory holds.


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## ckennylin

4 lights on one of 2 5TB-upgraded units this past Saturday night, all good after reboot. Between the two units, maybe 5-6 instances between the two since late summer 2018. I'll have to be more diligent in keeping records, but incidents are rare and minor. I do not power-save, do not record suggestions, and both are on TE3.

I purchased 3x 5TB drives from Costco as regular USB drives in December 2018 and one was DOA, so definitely test thoroughly before using.

Incidentally, the shucked drives are on the certified list for the Synology ds620 slim NAS as they are the only 5TB 2.5" drives in the market. Unfortunately, used units are not available and Synology NASs are rarely discounted.


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## marcao

I have just bought a 5TB 2.5" Seagate Backup Plus from Costco, removed the drive from the external enclosure and added into a 4-tuner Bolt Vox. Went through the guided setup process and the drive seem to have been formatted fine. System information shows 800 HD hours. Software version is 21.9.7.v10-USC-11-849. Is this expected now? No need to format the drive using MFS Reformatter? Thanks!


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## 3 Cushion John

marcao said:


> I have just bought a 5TB 2.5" Seagate Backup Plus from Costco, removed the drive from the external enclosure and added into a 4-tuner Bolt Vox. Went through the guided setup process and the drive seem to have been formatted fine. System information shows 800 HD hours. Software version is 21.9.7.v10-USC-11-849. Is this expected now? No need to format the drive using MFS Reformatter? Thanks!


It looks like you're good to go....


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## 3 Cushion John

RyanL said:


> Any issues yet? I've been running my 5TB Seagate SMR drive for 5 months but woke up to 4 flashing lights this Monday. Unplugged it and plugged it back in and it seemed to boot properly, but I'm not sure if the drive is on it's way out or not.


I don't think it's the drive. I had 4 lights flashing come and go over a 5 month period on a bolt 6-tuner. Changed 5T hard drives 3-4 times. Changed the the sata cable. Changed the main pwr cable. Even sprayed all electrical contacts with elect cleaner. Still the flashing lights came back. Nothing else to change. Result... Tivo motherboard.


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## marcao

3 Cushion John said:


> It looks like you're good to go....


I'm wondering if I shouldn't run MFS Reformatter anyway just to make sure that all partitions are properly aligned. I have no programs recorded so should be a simple exercise. Or will this just be a waste of time?


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## RyanL

3 Cushion John said:


> I don't think it's the drive. I had 4 lights flashing come and go over a 5 month period on a bolt 6-tuner. Changed 5T hard drives 3-4 times. Changed the the sata cable. Changed the main pwr cable. Even sprayed all electrical contacts with elect cleaner. Still the flashing lights came back. Nothing else to change. Result... Tivo motherboard.


Saw the flashing light ordeal again on mine a couple of mornings ago. So far it's happened late at night or early morning from what I can tell. Maybe it tries to go to sleep and something goes wrong, who knows. Whatever happens is clearly not the same as a crash; I've been using the bolt before and it will crash all of a sudden but then reboots on it's own. This wont reset itself without removing power.

Edit: Still never looked into placing all the guts for a bolt into a slightly larger case (think I mentioned a mini itx or something in my post above). But this is still on my mind. For one, I would like to be able to use a 3.5" drive (they've always seem much more reliable to me plus I could essentially go a bit bigger) and two, things get pretty damn warm in that little tivo case with that joke of a fan. Even one well placed 80mm low RPM fan would do so much of a better job of circulating air over the components.


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## Todd B.

So, I guess I'll add my experiences to this thread.

I got a Bolt in May 2017 (running TE3). I never even booted the stock 500 GB drive. I bought a Seagate Backup Plus 5TB (STDR5000100) and shucked it. ST5000LM000 inside. Installed it (didn't use MFSR or anything) and it booted up with no problem and full capacity. In the first few months, it seemed like there was a little choppiness, for example, when fast forwarding or rewinding. But eventually that settled down, and it basically performed perfectly normally. I was running at about 80-99% capacity filled for most of its life.

But then, in June 2019, I started having pixelations and freezes with reboots. Classic bad block symptoms. I didn't even mess around trying to diagnose or fix it. I bought a new Seagate Backup Plus 5TB (exact same model, inside and out), and cloned the TiVo drive with ddrescue. There were some sectors that were difficult to read and/or required retries, but ultimately, I was able to clone the entire drive except for a few hundred KB that were unreadable/unrecoverable. I put the new drive into the TiVo and it booted back up like nothing had happened, thank goodness.

After finishing the rescue process, I ran the failed drive through SeaTools, and it failed the diagnostics. Even though it was two months out of warranty, I contacted Seagate, and they replaced the drive anyway (I put it back into its enclosure). I sold the warranty replacement drive on eBay to recoup my costs.

So, again, the TiVo was running along fine at 80-99% filled with no issues, until yesterday when it suddenly rebooted. As I was using it, it was taking a really long time to do stuff. Pinwheels when trying to access the list of recordings (database access). Taking a long time to start playing back a show, or stalls when fast-forwarding or rewinding. And then it would stall out and then reboot a couples time. After rebooting one time, it was taking forever to start up. So, at that point, I pulled the plug and started a ddrescue to a 3.5" drive I had lying around. It is currently running, but I'm seeing really slow and inconsistent disk access from the TiVo drive. It is currently transferring at an average rate of about 14 MB/s, so it will take about 4 days to clone the whole drive. Fortunately, there are no read errors yet; it's just really slow. I can hear a soft rattling sound coming from the platters spinning. Every once in a while, the rattling sound stops for a few seconds and the transfer rate shoots up to normal speeds (150-ish MB/s). So it seems to be some kind of mechanical failure or misalignment.

Anyway, I'm done with these 2.5" drives. I plan to clone this to a new 8-12 TB external 3.5" drive and expand the partitions. I'm pissed at TiVo for unnecessarily making a crappy design that runs too hot and only uses 2.5" drives. I'm pissed at Seagate for making crappy drives. These errors (mechanical failure and bad blocks) were fully manifest during read-only rescue operations, so IMO the failures do not seem to be directly related to SMR writing, but rather just general Seagate crappiness (I have a low opinion of Seagate). Maybe it's possible that doing the TiVo standby thing above would have lengthened the lives of these drives, but maybe not. I think 3.5" drives will be much more reliable and without compromises (SMR and the Bolt running hot), so I'll be using that instead of internal drives. This drive is still under warranty, so I plan on trying to warranty replace it and sell the replacement once I'm done with my rescue.


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## zombiephysicist

Todd B. said:


> So, I guess I'll add my experiences to this thread.
> 
> I got a Bolt in May 2017 (running TE3). I never even booted the stock 500 GB drive. I bought a Seagate Backup Plus 5TB (STDR5000100) and shucked it. ST5000LM000 inside. Installed it (didn't use MFSR or anything) and it booted up with no problem and full capacity. In the first few months, it seemed like there was a little choppiness, for example, when fast forwarding or rewinding. But eventually that settled down, and it basically performed perfectly normally. I was running at about 80-99% capacity filled for most of its life.
> 
> But then, in June 2019, I started having pixelations and freezes with reboots. Classic bad block symptoms. I didn't even mess around trying to diagnose or fix it. I bought a new Seagate Backup Plus 5TB (exact same model, inside and out), and cloned the TiVo drive with ddrescue. There were some sectors that were difficult to read and/or required retries, but ultimately, I was able to clone the entire drive except for a few hundred KB that were unreadable/unrecoverable. I put the new drive into the TiVo and it booted back up like nothing had happened, thank goodness.
> 
> After finishing the rescue process, I ran the failed drive through SeaTools, and it failed the diagnostics. Even though it was two months out of warranty, I contacted Seagate, and they replaced the drive anyway (I put it back into its enclosure). I sold the warranty replacement drive on eBay to recoup my costs.
> 
> So, again, the TiVo was running along fine at 80-99% filled with no issues, until yesterday when it suddenly rebooted. As I was using it, it was taking a really long time to do stuff. Pinwheels when trying to access the list of recordings (database access). Taking a long time to start playing back a show, or stalls when fast-forwarding or rewinding. And then it would stall out and then reboot a couples time. After rebooting one time, it was taking forever to start up. So, at that point, I pulled the plug and started a ddrescue to a 3.5" drive I had lying around. It is currently running, but I'm seeing really slow and inconsistent disk access from the TiVo drive. It is currently transferring at an average rate of about 14 MB/s, so it will take about 4 days to clone the whole drive. Fortunately, there are no read errors yet; it's just really slow. I can hear a soft rattling sound coming from the platters spinning. Every once in a while, the rattling sound stops for a few seconds and the transfer rate shoots up to normal speeds (150-ish MB/s). So it seems to be some kind of mechanical failure or misalignment.
> 
> Anyway, I'm done with these 2.5" drives. I plan to clone this to a new 8-12 TB external 3.5" drive and expand the partitions. I'm pissed at TiVo for unnecessarily making a crappy design that runs too hot and only uses 2.5" drives. I'm pissed at Seagate for making crappy drives. These errors (mechanical failure and bad blocks) were fully manifest during read-only rescue operations, so IMO the failures do not seem to be directly related to SMR writing, but rather just general Seagate crappiness (I have a low opinion of Seagate). Maybe it's possible that doing the TiVo standby thing above would have lengthened the lives of these drives, but maybe not. I think 3.5" drives will be much more reliable and without compromises (SMR and the Bolt running hot), so I'll be using that instead of internal drives. This drive is still under warranty, so I plan on trying to warranty replace it and sell the replacement once I'm done with my rescue.


I my friend an I have been running a 2.5" ssd for more than 2 years. You can see it in this thread. Pricey but might be worth considering.

5TB Bolt Drive to 7.68TB SSD Upgrade, Best Approach?


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## ckennylin

ckennylin said:


> 4 lights on one of 2 5TB-upgraded units this past Saturday night, all good after reboot. Between the two units, maybe 5-6 instances between the two since late summer 2018. I'll have to be more diligent in keeping records, but incidents are rare and minor. I do not power-save, do not record suggestions, and both are on TE3.
> 
> I purchased 3x 5TB drives from Costco as regular USB drives in December 2018 and one was DOA, so definitely test thoroughly before using.
> 
> Incidentally, the shucked drives are on the certified list for the Synology ds620 slim NAS as they are the only 5TB 2.5" drives in the market. Unfortunately, used units are not available and Synology NASs are rarely discounted.


OK, one has finally died with too many remap errors, one other may die soon as it has seen some 4-light issues. Here's the results from SeaTools, though it passes SMART:










Victoria has better details:










I did lose a LOT of recordings that were HDCP-protected, but on the bright side, it is time I won't be spending on a couch to watch, and I'm sure they are available to stream anyway. I am curious about the G-Sensor stat.


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## jmbach

ckennylin said:


> OK, one has finally died with too many remap errors, one other may die soon as it has seen some 4-light issues. Here's the results from SeaTools, though it passes SMART:
> 
> View attachment 61539
> 
> 
> Victoria has better details:
> 
> View attachment 61540
> 
> 
> I did lose a LOT of recordings that were HDCP-protected, but on the bright side, it is time I won't be spending on a couch to watch, and I'm sure they are available to stream anyway. I am curious about the G-Sensor stat.


The interesting stat for me was the annualized TB/year. I am not sure if that is write only or both read and write. If it is write and I am thinking this through, all tuners are constantly recording to their respective buffers. So if it write only, that number would not change no matter how many shows you record. That would then give us an average TB/year per tuner assuming the drive was was used brand new in the TiVo and the TiVo was continuously on since drive installation.

I did not catch if this was a 4 or 6 tuner TiVo.

I'll need to do a little research to see if that stat includes reads as well.

Sent from my SM-G998U using Tapatalk


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## ckennylin

jmbach said:


> The interesting stat for me was the annualized TB/year. I am not sure if that is write only or both read and write. If it is write and I am thinking this through, all tuners are constantly recording to their respective buffers. So if it write only, that number would not change no matter how many shows you record. That would then give us an average TB/year per tuner assuming the drive was was used brand new in the TiVo and the TiVo was continuously on since drive installation.
> 
> I did not catch if this was a 4 or 6 tuner TiVo.
> 
> I'll need to do a little research to see if that stat includes reads as well.
> 
> Sent from my SM-G998U using Tapatalk


Sorry, my unit is a 4-tuner Bolt running TE3 with no power savings. I'm waiting for the Costco sale starting this Wednesday to get a replacement 5TB and see if I can rescue the contents. I checked my warranty on this and it expired October 2020 - new ones have 5-year warranty with Rescue+, which is worthless but a replacement drive is better than nothing.

I'm guessing most of the activity is for the 30-minute cache writes on the 4 channels since I haven't used the bolt to watch TV much - most of my viewing has been online, and I use the bolt primarily to record shows that I end up not watching. The non HDCP-protected shows get transferred via TiVo Desktop -> VideoRedo -> Handbrake -> NAS and remain mostly unwatched. Attempting to recovery contents from this drive should be an interesting learning experience.

I may turn on Power Savings on the replacement - I was initially concerned with the added wear & tear from the drive powering on/off, but maybe those fears are unfounded these days.


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## ckennylin

ckennylin said:


> Sorry, my unit is a 4-tuner Bolt running TE3 with no power savings. I'm waiting for the Costco sale starting this Wednesday to get a replacement 5TB and see if I can rescue the contents. I checked my warranty on this and it expired October 2020 - new ones have 5-year warranty with Rescue+, which is worthless but a replacement drive is better than nothing.
> 
> I'm guessing most of the activity is for the 30-minute cache writes on the 4 channels since I haven't used the bolt to watch TV much - most of my viewing has been online, and I use the bolt primarily to record shows that I end up not watching. The non HDCP-protected shows get transferred via TiVo Desktop -> VideoRedo -> Handbrake -> NAS and remain mostly unwatched. Attempting to recovery contents from this drive should be an interesting learning experience.
> 
> I may turn on Power Savings on the replacement - I was initially concerned with the added wear & tear from the drive powering on/off, but maybe those fears are unfounded these days.


$95 for the replacement from Costco, limit 3. Also found out I had initially purchased the original with an Amex card and the warranty expired in October 2020, which the Amex card added 1 year to. The Extended Warranty Claim was effortless painless to file since I had scanned receipts.

The old drive is beyond rescue as it even fails SeaTools. While I'm installing the replacement, I noticed a bit of vibration from the drive itself and the original USB enclosures had rubber isolators all over the place. I'm curious whether cutting the old isolators and adding them to this drive would help with longevity, though it would add another 2mm to the 15mm height of the drive and the cover is already tight. May as well since the cover is open anyway.

I'll have to proactively replace the drive on another one - it had flashing lights before but recovered each time I rebooted, so I'm curious how that one will fare.


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## global_dev

global_dev said:


> I just dropped in a 5TB seagate (I know about all the issues people are having last couple of weeks) this AM into a fresh Bolt (500GB) non-vox. It booted up fine w/ 21.8.3.RC2-USC-11-849 on the original drive and the popping in the 5.


My 5TB seems to have died. Could have been some surges this week, from crazy storms on thursday night, hard to say. but ~4 years - not a bad run. popped an OG 1TB drive in and works fine. tried to reformat/mfsr the 5tb, but i think a sector fault is popping. MFSR says it's ok, but WD tools, says it fails an extended analysis.


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## 3 Cushion John

global_dev said:


> My 5TB seems to have died. Could have been some surges this week, from crazy storms on thursday night, hard to say. but ~4 years - not a bad run. popped an OG 1TB drive in and works fine. tried to reformat/mfsr the 5tb, but i think a sector fault is popping. MFSR says it's ok, but WD tools, says it fails an extended analysis.


The early 5TBs had some issues, I found. Expecially from Amazon. I've got 2 Edges running Costco's 5Ts for over a year now, and still going OK. And they're cheaper.


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