# 300gb Samsung drives for $99 at CompUSA



## Dkerr24 (Oct 29, 2004)

In case anyone is looking to upgrade their Tivos, CompUSA is running a special for $99 on the Samsung 300gb, 8mb cache, 7200 rpm IDE drives. This is not a rebate, it is an instant $50 off the regular price of the drive.

I bought one to replace the Maxtor 160gb drive in my Samsung S4040R which is starting to fail.


----------



## Dkerr24 (Oct 29, 2004)

Just to followup, I installed that drive in my Samsung S4040R, and it is very quiet... in fact, much quieter than the Maxtor 160gb unit it replaced.


----------



## will792 (Jan 4, 2005)

Dkerr24 said:


> Just to followup, I installed that drive in my Samsung S4040R, and it is very quiet... in fact, much quieter than the Maxtor 160gb unit it replaced.


What is the warranty on Samsung drive?


----------



## HomieG (Feb 17, 2003)

Dkerr24 said:


> Just to followup, I installed that drive in my Samsung S4040R, and it is very quiet... in fact, much quieter than the Maxtor 160gb unit it replaced.


That's been my experience with both 3.5" and 2.5" Samsung hard drives. Not to mention their reliability, which has also been excellent.


----------



## jporter12 (Mar 10, 2006)

I put one in my DSR7000 DirecTivo not long ago. It's slightly louder than the 40GB maxtor it replaced, but not enough that I really ever hear it. According to Samsung's website, the life cycle is 5 years. I found nothing there about the warranty period. I went to micro center's website (I bought my drive at micro center for $119.99) and they say it is a 1 yr warranty (Drive was OEM, is the compUSA drive in a retail box?) At any rate, I'm not really worried about it.


----------



## jporter12 (Mar 10, 2006)

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to send out another thanks to those that have documented the process of installing a new drive (I can take care of this on a PC with Windows all day long, but a TiVo with linux, I'm a bit slow!) and also to Gunny, rbautch, etc... whose hard work went into the zipper, and the stuff that the zipper provides us with!


----------



## Dkerr24 (Oct 29, 2004)

The drive I bought had a 3 year warranty from Samsung. It was boxed as a Samsung drive, not as the store label CompUSA brand that was in their ad.


----------



## jedwards (Jun 1, 2003)

I bought one yesterday.

The drive is a Samsung HD300LD.
It comes in a retail box with a cable and screws.

The drive is compatible with the Hitachi drive utilities which may be more convenient for some users since hitachi provides raw floppy images and iso CD images. Samsung utilities for these drives are only available from their website in a self extracting archive for Windows users.

In case it is helpful for others, here is my description of upgrading a stock Series 2 model 240080a.

I downloaded and burned the following two images to CDs.
http://www.ptvupgrade.com/downloads/ptvlba48-4.02.iso
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/downloads/ftool_201.iso

I used a shell of an old PC as follows.
Primary ATA - Samsung HD300LD as master.
Secondary ATA - Master ATAPI CDRom
Secondary ATA - Slave 80GB Maxtor drive from Tivo

Note that if you connect the drives to your PC differently, you will use different device names in your commands. The names are pretty easy to figure out. hda, and hdb are the master and slave on the primary ATA bus. hdc, and hdd are the secondary master and slave, respectively.

I booted to the ftool cd. I used the tools to tune the Acoustic Management settings to max quiet (slowest seek setting). Remember to OK out of the AM screen to save the setting.

I booted to the PTV upgrade CD.
I hit return at the boot prompt for the default settings.

From the prompt, to verify the original drive was seen as an 80 hour Tivo drive (81 hour), I ran:
mfstool info /dev/hdd

I then performed the upgrade:
mfstool backup -Tao - /dev/hdd | mfstool restore -s 160 -r 4 -pxi - /dev/hda

I chose 160MB of swap here since I am old fashioned and 160 is the smallest multiple of 32MB > 150. It is recommended that you have at least 1 block of swap for each 2 GiB of disk space.

Then I ran tpip to format the new swap:
tpip -s --swapped /dev/hda

After installing the new drive, the system works better than before. I had about 60GB of stored video, so my backup/restore operation ran for about 6 hours.

The drive is quieter, faster, and cooler than the stock drive it replaced. My other Stock series 2s, run at 38C when just recording the live TV buffer, and peak at 50C when recording and playing back simultaneously. The new system, when heavily taxed runs at 39C: 39C was measured when the system was recording a movie at high quality, tranferring a recording from another Tivo, and playing back a third recording simultaneously. The idle noise of the drive itself may be slightly louder than the stock drive, but the seek noise is less noticeable and the fan runs less. Over all, the system seems much quieter.

Since I plan to upgrade another Tivo in a couple of days, I am transferring the shows that I want to keep from that Tivo to the one I just upgraded. I will then delete them from that unit so that the next backup/restore will go much more quickly.

When I first performed the upgrade, I omitted the "-r 4" option. A death in the family required me to travel unexpectedly. Upon my return, the system crashed several times as I used it. I resolved this, temporarily, by deleting about 30 shows from "Recently deleted". Then I upgraded again. Although 160 should have been more than enough swap using a larger mfs allocation block size, I have been running some tests on a pair of Series 2 using both 300MB and 511MB of swap. I will fill them completely over the next few days and test their stability under high memory load.


----------



## Dkerr24 (Oct 29, 2004)

jedwards: Thanks for that write-up. I know many folks are a bit intimidated reading the loong Hinsdale guide. Having it condensed into a few paragraphs of just what you need is very helpful!

I didn't run the Acoustical Management software on my new Samsung drive. It's not any noisier than the Maxtor 160gb unit it replaced.

In my case, I haven't noticed any differences in interior temperatures compared to the old drive. I did take my can of compressed air and clean out the exhaust fan in back and cleaned off the motherboard while I had the cover off.


----------



## ab3tx (Mar 13, 2006)

I got in on this deal Sat. morn after I saw the post. Thanks DKerr! 

Upgrade was smooth and clean. I went from a stock 540040 to a 340-hr 540 in less than an hour. I didn't set the acoustics at first, but I noticed some seek noise, so I yanked the drive again and turned it on. I still can hear it seek when the room & TV are quiet, but it's not bad. I did have a little bit of motor whine on the old Quickview 40GB, but there is none on the Samsung. In fact, if the drive is not seeking, the only thing I can hear is the unit fan when my ear is up to it. My temps with the new drive are inline with the pre-upgrade temps. 

I was concerned that the imaging portion of my drive only took about 45 minutes, including moving shows (33GB total), but I was using a PIII 800, so I guess that helped. I've watched a few shows and checked a few more, so I know it worked, I guess my particular setup was just a bit faster than others. 

Thanks also to jedwards for the writeup. I've been planning this for awhile and that is the most clearly and concisely written start-to-finish guide I've seen on the boards. With a caveat added to use Weaknees for the the exact switches for your configuration, that is sticky material, IMO.


----------



## ducker (Feb 21, 2006)

now when I look at wha I should do for my upgrade I see only 1 command line to type something like:
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdX (/dev/hdY) | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdZ (/dev/hdZZ

which is a bit different then the one you used:
mfstool backup -Tao - /dev/hdd | mfstool restore -s 160 -pxi - /dev/hda

using the guide here:
http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/

not to mention you also run:
tpip -s --swapped /dev/hda

why is that?


----------

