# Turning the premiere on and off



## JY78GRAD (Apr 3, 2010)

Would there be a problem with putting our tivo premiere on a switched outlet, to be able to turn the unit off when not in use, and then back on when we want to dvr something? It seems like such a waste to hear the fan running 24/7 and the unit drawing some current, not to mention that it would seem to shorten the life of the unit running it all the time. I know by turning it off, I would have to manually connect to tivo to get updates. I also have tivo suggestions turned off. Has any one put theirs on a switched outlet or unplug when not in use? Would it hurt the unit?
Thanks.


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## dtrocchio (Nov 19, 2007)

Have you tried putting the TiVo into standby mode? I've got a feeling you're looking for more of a 'one-switch' solution you can just hit on your way out of a room though...


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## daveak (Mar 23, 2009)

Not the ideal solution. They only use about 25w so is it that much of a concern? I would think all the hard shutdowns would not be beneficial for the hard drive life and reliability. Would you do a hard shutdown of your computer everyday like this? Think of your TiVo the same way.


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## jmill (Feb 22, 2010)

daveak said:


> Not the ideal solution. They only use about 25w so is it that much of a concern? I would think all the hard shutdowns would not be beneficial for the hard drive life and reliability. Would you do a hard shutdown of your computer everyday like this? Think of your TiVo the same way.


I hardly doubt shutting off TiVo will do anything to the hard drive. Modern hard drives are designed to spin down / spin up at least a few million times. Trust me, TiVo will come up with Series 6 by the time hard drive dies only because of frequent spin downs.

It is just stupid to turn off TiVo and than wait 3-5 minutes for TiVo to start up every time. I guess just deal with the fan or return the unit if you don't like the fan.

Do you also disconnect the battery in your car every time you park? Exactly same situation here.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

JY78GRAD said:


> Would there be a problem with putting our tivo premiere on a switched outlet, to be able to turn the unit off when not in use, and then back on when we want to dvr something? It seems like such a waste to hear the fan running 24/7 and the unit drawing some current, not to mention that it would seem to shorten the life of the unit running it all the time. I know by turning it off, I would have to manually connect to tivo to get updates. I also have tivo suggestions turned off. Has any one put theirs on a switched outlet or unplug when not in use? Would it hurt the unit?
> Thanks.


I hope you have replaced ALL your incandescent bulbs. Those waste much more power than any TiVo does.


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## DaveWhittle (Jul 25, 2002)

JY78GRAD said:


> Would there be a problem with putting our tivo premiere on a switched outlet, to be able to turn the unit off when not in use, and then back on when we want to dvr something?


Not a "problem", but this is the opposite of how a DVR is designed to work. If you forget about it, you're bound to miss recording a show in a season pass if it's turned off. Also, you'll miss any software updates. 

It's highly recommended to leave a TiVo (and all DVRs) on 24/7.


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## RichB (Apr 2, 2003)

I do not believe TiVo has an orderly power off. 
It has a restart. Therefore, TiVo will always be in the middle of something when you yank the power. 

I know, the file systems are supposed to handle it, but that does not make it a good idea.

I would not do this.

- Rich


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## gweempose (Mar 23, 2003)

For anyone who is interested, there is a great little device called a Kill A Watt which measures the power draw of anything you plug into it.


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

The quickest way to destroy most any electronic equipment (especially those containing a hard drive or other non-solid state device) is to regularly power cycle it. I would strongly recommend against turning a TiVo on and off and on and off... especially since yanking the power is not a proper shutdown (which can also eventually lead to filesystem failure).


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

DaveWhittle said:


> Not a "problem", but this is the opposite of how a DVR is designed to work. If you forget about it, you're bound to miss recording a show in a season pass if it's turned off. Also, you'll miss any software updates.


And you will most likely miss daily update connections so you would run out of guide data unless you happened to have it on when the daily connection is suppose to occur.


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## ltxi (Feb 14, 2010)

RichB said:


> I do not believe TiVo has an orderly power off.
> It has a restart. Therefore, TiVo will always be in the middle of something when you yank the power.
> 
> I know, the file systems are supposed to handle it, but that does not make it a good idea.
> ...


x2+


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## Worf (Sep 15, 2000)

jmill said:


> I hardly doubt shutting off TiVo will do anything to the hard drive. Modern hard drives are designed to spin down / spin up at least a few million times. Trust me, TiVo will come up with Series 6 by the time hard drive dies only because of frequent spin downs.
> .


False, actually.

A hard drive that's sent a software spindown and spinup request (orderly) can do about 50,000 cycles.

A hard drive that's powered down without a software spindown goes into an "emergency park" mode, which most drives is around 10,000-odd cycles.

The difference is that an orderly spindown has the drive moving the heads to the park zone (or park position), then spins down the platters. The emergency park mode, there's no power, and the only energy available is what's stored in the spinning platters. That little bit of power is used to fling the heads into the park position (this must be done ASAP - the platters are spinning down more rapidly because they're used to power the logic circuits and a minimum RPM is needed to keep the heads flying above the platter - if the platters go too slow then the heads will start to scrape the platters).

Unfortunately, the (violent) flinging of the heads wears out the mechanical components far quicker.

On the software side, well the filesystems on TiVo are designed to be as robust as possible to handle sudden powerdowns, but they're still supposed to be infrequent - who knows what combination of edge cases may result in inadvertent corruption, between the software cache, disk caches, and stage of operation.

Also, TiVo's designed to operate 24/7 - either suggestion recordings, or recordings you schedule (which TiVo may catch earlier showings of to avoid conflicts).


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## jmill (Feb 22, 2010)

Worf said:


> False, actually.
> 
> A hard drive that's sent a software spindown and spinup request (orderly) can do about 50,000 cycles.
> 
> A hard drive that's powered down without a software spindown goes into an "emergency park" mode, which most drives is around 10,000-odd cycles.


It amazes me how people make up numbers. The average load cycle count (LCC or START_STOP_COUNTER) is about 300,000 for WD drives before drive will show any possible failure. So really, do not pull up numbers out of you know where and make them sound as a fact.

Specifications for the 1 and 2 TB WD AV-GP internal hard drive

The point in this thread is correct though as it was mentioned thousand times already, TiVo has not been designed to be turned off. It will run much better and function much longer if left to be running 24/7


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

gweempose said:


> For anyone who is interested, there is a great little device called a Kill A Watt which measures the power draw of anything you plug into it.


I used one of those to measure the power usage from my Premieres. The XL and non XL draw between 23 and 25 watts. with 24 watts being the typical usage..


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## ZeoTiVo (Jan 2, 2004)

jmill said:


> Modern hard drives are designed to spin down / spin up at least a few million times.





jmill said:


> It amazes me how people make up numbers. The average load cycle count (LCC or START_STOP_COUNTER) is about 300,000 for WD drives before drive will show any possible failure. So really, do not pull up numbers out of you know where and make them sound as a fact.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)




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## Mike-Mike (Mar 2, 2010)

hahaha


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## jmill (Feb 22, 2010)

yeah, yeah, yeah... got me there 

I do have several drives that are at 1,600,000 LCC count. So far going strong. They're not WD Green drives though.


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## ZeoTiVo (Jan 2, 2004)

jmill said:


> yeah, yeah, yeah... got me there
> 
> I do have several drives that are at 1,600,000 LCC count. So far going strong. They're not WD Green drives though.


hehe

I do see your same pattern though
most hard drives that have been going since forever and a few that died unexpectedly (one in a TiVo that was rarely rebooted) - it is not power cycles but bad part or bad mfg. that slipped through that likely did them in.


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## RichB (Apr 2, 2003)

In this case, the drive never parks.
Pulling the plug, is not good for the file system.
The drive never parks, that is not good.

How many people shut their PC's off by cutting the master power.
After all, Windows uses a journaled file system.

Pulling the plug every day is not even remotely a good idea.

- Rich


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## ldobson (Jan 18, 2004)

JY78GRAD said:


> Would there be a problem with putting our tivo premiere on a switched outlet, to be able to turn the unit off when not in use, and then back on when we want to dvr something? It seems like such a waste to hear the fan running 24/7 and the unit drawing some current, not to mention that it would seem to shorten the life of the unit running it all the time. I know by turning it off, I would have to manually connect to tivo to get updates. I also have tivo suggestions turned off. Has any one put theirs on a switched outlet or unplug when not in use? Would it hurt the unit?
> Thanks.


DVR's are intended to be left in a powered up state, I am not sure why you would want to put the extra wear and tear on your TiVo. Like computers, these devices are made to stay on as they are continously accessing network resources.


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## gweempose (Mar 23, 2003)

I agree that you definitely don't want to randomly yank the plug on a TiVo if you can avoid it. That being said, I believe you can safely shut down the TiVo by forcing a restart and then pulling the plug right when the bios first starts to boot back up. Basically, as soon as it says "Welcome! Powering up ...", it should be safe to cut the power.


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## crxssi (Apr 5, 2010)

RichB said:


> How many people shut their PC's off by cutting the master power.
> After all, Windows uses a journaled file system.


Believe it or not, not all Personal Computers run MS-Windows (like your statement seems to imply). And Linux has been using journaling filesystems a lot longer than MS-Windows. But either way, an unnecessary power-yank on just about any type of computer is just not a good idea.

And the TiVo is most certainly a computer (a Linux one at that).


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## 9300170 (Feb 21, 2003)

How is it supposed to record your shows if it is turned off? I guess that I'm missing something here. You want to make your TiVo dumber than a 1980's VCR?


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

JY78GRAD said:


> Would there be a problem with putting our tivo premiere on a switched outlet, to be able to turn the unit off when not in use, and then back on when we want to dvr something? It seems like such a waste to hear the fan running 24/7 and the unit drawing some current, not to mention that it would seem to shorten the life of the unit running it all the time. I know by turning it off, I would have to manually connect to tivo to get updates. I also have tivo suggestions turned off. Has any one put theirs on a switched outlet or unplug when not in use? Would it hurt the unit?
> Thanks.


I have been doing that for the last three years with my Series 3 original and upgraded drive, never had a problem. I turn it off a 4am because that will give the 2am software update time to work, and turn it back on at 5PM. I never record anything in those hours and I will almost double the life of the hard drive. Many on this form go nuts when they hear this as they are convinced that this will hurt the system, they have no evidence of this, just their gut, but it does cut the power down in 1/2. So my TiVo starts 365 time per year, that not going to harm any drive or TiVo. (If I turn it on and off every 10 minutes that may be a much different story)
Oh and for the people that run large servers with many hard drives that run for years on UPS and have to be shut down for some service reason, they may report that some of the hard drives don't start back up. that can be true because the drive has run years without going into the park position and some small amount dust may get on the unused part of the head arm and cause a jam after that many years of continuing running.
Many people have religion about not turning things on and off, I will not dispute such people.


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## ZeoTiVo (Jan 2, 2004)

lessd said:


> Oh and for the people that run large servers with many hard drives that run for years on UPS


that would be Google - who has a study made public that shows you are not doubling the life of your drive, and also you are not halving the life of your drive. The shutting down and restarting has no effect either way on the life of the drive from the study they did on a large collection of drives from many different vendors.

What you do is save some electricity which is an alright thing in itself.


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

ZeoTiVo said:


> that would be Google - who has a study made public that shows you are not doubling the life of your drive, and also you are not halving the life of your drive. The shutting down and restarting has no effect either way on the life of the drive from the study they did on a large collection of drives from many different vendors.


If turning a drive off does not increase the life of the drive, its life life must than be time related from the manufacturing date. If that were so, I could put a 100 new drives on the shelf and another 100 drives running 24/7. At some point in time 1/2 of the running drives will have failed, at that point if I than ran up the 100 drives that were on the shelf would I expect somewhat close to 1/2 of them now not work, I don't think so.


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## ZeoTiVo (Jan 2, 2004)

lessd said:


> If turning a drive off does not increase the life of the drive, its life life must than be time related from the manufacturing date. If that were so, I could put a 100 new drives on the shelf and another 100 drives running 24/7. At some point in time 1/2 of the running drives will have failed, at that point if I than ran up the 100 drives that were on the shelf would I expect somewhat close to 1/2 of them now not work, I don't think so.


wow, no use arguing with that


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## b_scott (Nov 27, 2006)

leave it on. the fan doesn't run that much. it doesn't draw that much power, and like any computer it's better to run 24/7 than to cold boot every day.


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## Phantom Gremlin (Jun 20, 2002)

b_scott said:


> leave it on. the fan doesn't run that much. it doesn't draw that much power, and like any computer it's better to run 24/7 than to cold boot every day.


Yes, exactly. Thermal cycling has always been bad for electronic components. It has become even worse lately because lead-free solder just isn't very reliable to start with, and it's trying to maintain reliable connections to tinier and tinier pins.

But that's OK, we live in a throwaway society. When your cr*p breaks, just buy new replacement cr*p. E.g. explain to me how Jobs (with Algore on his board) gets away with non-replaceable batteries in all his recent products. And, no, shipping something halfway across the country to replace a battery is not a "save the planet" type of solution.

BTW the Premiere is supposed to be much lower power than the TiVo HD. So at least it's saving a lot of electricity over all those older DVRs, both from TiVo and from the cable companies.


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## CharlesH (Aug 29, 2002)

Phantom Gremlin said:


> BTW the Premiere is supposed to be much lower power than the TiVo HD. So at least it's saving a lot of electricity over all those older DVRs, both from TiVo and from the cable companies.


The Premiere uses around 23W. The Series 3 I have uses around 39W, according to the display on my UPS; I assume the Tivo HD is similar. True, the Premiere uses less, but the S3 models are not exactly power hogs.


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## retired_guy (Aug 27, 2004)

I've owned eight TiVos and have had hard failures on only three of them. But the failures all occurred during power down/up sequences. One was probably a S3 file corruption problem since it's been working fine for over a year since I cleaned up the files; the other two may have been hardware failures or software corruption--don't really know; they were S2 systems which I was about ready to shelve in any case. But these experiences convinced me to put all my systems on UPS and only power off/on when forced to. It seems to me to be an act of great but unreasoned faith in TiVo software and hardware to think their code is so clean and hardware so well designed and constructed you can abruptly power down at any random point in time without running risk of file corruption or hardware failure.


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## dianebrat (Jul 6, 2002)

retired_guy said:


> It seems to me to be an act of great but unreasoned faith in TiVo software and hardware to think their code is so clean and hardware so well designed and constructed you can abruptly power down at any random point in time without running risk of file corruption or hardware failure.


To your point, they can't compensate for hardware failures in the power up or down process.

However what has been shown over the years again and again is that they have done a very good job at utilizing a file system and OS that assumes it has nothing in cache and can go down at any point and return without negative impact.

Diane


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## RichB (Apr 2, 2003)

dianebrat said:


> To your point, they can't compensate for hardware failures in the power up or down process.
> 
> However what has been shown over the years again and again is that they have done a very good job at utilizing a file system and OS that assumes it has nothing in cache and can go down at any point and return without negative impact.
> 
> Diane


Failing to READ cache data does not increase reliability. To the extent that it add disk-IO, it can reduce the life span of the product.

It is write-caching that is dangerous to the file system. Journaled file systems are designed to mitigate the danger.

- Rich

P.S. An aborupt power failure and multiple-try restart destroyed one of TiVo drives. Now I put the critical TiVo's on UPS's.


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## ltxi (Feb 14, 2010)

RichB said:


> P.S. An aborupt power failure and multiple-try restart destroyed one of TiVo drives. Now I put the critical TiVo's on UPS's.


Had a lightning strike on a cable head less than 100 yards from my house in '97. Big lesson learned. Since then, every piece of electronics I own is either on an UPS (computers/Tivos/any low power device) or a good surge arrestor......including the garage door opener and my bedside clock.


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