# 1T drive upgrade time.



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

It's quite a few years since I last upgraded by Tivo
current spec (from memory):-
UK spec
single 80Gb drive
cachecard with 512M ram
tivoweb

it only records off a freeview box using scart

lately we've noticed that we're not so happy with using the low quality setting

so... I bought a Western Digital WD10EACS 1T drive, and part number A05HL SATA to ATA converter from Maplin, picture here http://images.maplin.co.uk/300/a05hl.jpg

the drive arrived today and hopefully the converter tomorrow.

I'm not sure if this converter feeds power to the SATA drive as well, I hope so.

We have an old Sony 22 inch Trinitron telly which I suppose one day I'll replace with a flat one. I don't suppose I'll buy a huge telly though as we only sit 10ft from the screen.

Some questions.

1. Yes I know I need LBA48 kernel, but I'm a little worried that if Tivo inc ever then tried to do a software upgrade and change the kernel wouldn't that be a problem?

2. Am I really going to notice the difference between highest quality and Mode 0 with my setup? should I bother with that mod too?

3. currently I do sometimes copy programs off the tivo over ethernet onto my PC. Is this viable in higher quality modes? presumably the files get huge

4. I use tytool to do the copying onto my PC (haven't done it for a while). Is there a better tool available now? is there one I could run on a Linux desktop?

Any other problems I'm likely to have?

thanks


----------



## Chips N Guac (Apr 9, 2009)

dieselnutjob said:


> I don't suppose I'll buy a huge telly though as we only sit 10ft from the screen.


I dont know about your questions.. I just wanted to respond to the comment I have quoted. Your TV size should roughly equal half the viewing distance. If you sit 10ft from the screen, 10ft x 12 inches per foot = 120 total inches of viewing distance. Half of 120 is 60... therefore your optimal size TV for that viewing distance is a 60" TV. :up:


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

the sata to pata converter arrived this morning
it says in the instructions that only support SATA Generation 1, 1.5GB/s mode

the 1T drive on the other hand is 3GB/s.

However it says that if I jumper pins 5 and 6 together that this engages OPT1 mode which will also limit the drive to 1.5GB/s.

it sounds like I *should* set this jumper

any reason not to?


----------



## Fred Smith (Oct 5, 2002)

Firstly the adapter is as far as I am aware as yet untested in a TiVo. So good luck. Regarding speed the TiVo ATA interface is only ATA 33 I think (stand to be corrected) so the SATA speed has no real relevance. I would try it both way if it works at all.


----------



## B33K34 (Feb 9, 2003)

Can anyone recommend an IDE/SATA converter than will work with Tivo?


----------



## Fred Smith (Oct 5, 2002)

http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=406102 post 27.


----------



## Tony Hoyle (Apr 1, 2002)

Chips N Guac said:


> I dont know about your questions.. I just wanted to respond to the comment I have quoted. Your TV size should roughly equal half the viewing distance. If you sit 10ft from the screen, 10ft x 12 inches per foot = 120 total inches of viewing distance. Half of 120 is 60... therefore your optimal size TV for that viewing distance is a 60" TV. :up:


The normal measurement is 3x or 6x height depending on whether you're dealing with HD or SD.

So for a 60" screen that would be 30" high, for SD viewing would be about 15 feet viewing distance (7.5 feet for HD), or going the other way around, you'd want no bigger than 42" at 10 feet for SD.

Because most people don't rearrange their furniture when switching between SD and HD they normally end up somewhere in the middle.. I tend to optimise for HD as I watch a fair amount of that.

(heights from ScreenMath, which is worth the read all on its own).


----------



## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

A 22 inch TV from 10 feet away - I don't think you're going to see much (any?) difference.


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

more like 8ft

anyway......

the drive is copying old to new at this very moment
I'm copying the entire contents, programs n all

the bios in my old PC didn't like the 1T drive much (said it was invalid), but the kernel in the MFStools CD seems just fine with it

used this command
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -r 4 -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hda 

I'll leave it overnight
tomorrow morning we'll see if the Tivo likes the drive or not

MUST REMEMBER TO COPY LBA48 KERNEL in the morning (shouting at myself)


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

bad news
tivo gets stuck at "Welcome. Powering up"
I guess it doesn't like the SATA to ATA converter.
Anyone know a UK supplier where I can get a converter that is known to work?


----------



## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

I don't know for sure, but i doubt it would get that far if it was a problem with the disk. After all that screen is loaded from the disk!

Double check you've done all teh LBA48 stuff.


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

Found out that tivoheaven have a converter which they seem to "guarantee" will work with WD green drives, and cheaper than Maplin too.
I'm sure I can get a refund off Maplin if I stick it back in the original packaging.


----------



## RobbyBoy (Apr 21, 2003)

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/IDE-PATA-To-SATA-Converter-Adapter-For-HDD-DVD-SA20K_W0QQitemZ250358263783QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCA_Cables_Adapters?hash=item250358263783&_trksid=p3911.c0.m14&_trkparms=66%3A2|65%3A1|39%3A1|240%3A1318
This is the one i got used it with a 500Gb WDGreen drive
Robert


----------



## B33K34 (Feb 9, 2003)

RobbyBoy said:


> http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/IDE-PATA-To-SATA-Converter-Adapter-For-HDD-DVD-SA20K_W0QQitemZ250358263783QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCA_Cables_Adapters?hash=item250358263783&_trksid=p3911.c0.m14&_trkparms=66%3A2|65%3A1|39%3A1|240%3A1318
> This is the one i got used it with a 500Gb WDGreen drive
> Robert


I've ordered one of those - at that price it has to be worth a go.


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

it's working 
so don't buy a sata to ide converter from maplin
the only change I made was to set the swap partition to 500
from my understanding there is a bug in mfstools setting a swap bigger that 127, but, when you run copykern it then overwrites / fixes the bad swap partition so now you can go bigger than 127
the only other gotcha is that you can't just boot the CD and run copykern
you have to boot the CD and type something like "mount /dev/hdb /cdrom" assuming that hdb is your CDROM drive
the copykern command assumes that the CD is mounted in /cdrom, but that doesn't happen by default
also it won't let you select hda so your new 1T tivo drive can't be connected as primary master
I copied everything off the old drive including 60G of programs in about 3 hours. That's on an old pentium 3 but it does have a UDMA100 drive controller


----------



## mutant_matt2 (Dec 16, 2008)

dieselnutjob said:


> it's working
> the only other gotcha is that you can't just boot the CD and run copykern
> you have to boot the CD and type something like "mount /dev/hdb /cdrom" assuming that hdb is your CDROM drive
> the copykern command assumes that the CD is mounted in /cdrom, but that doesn't happen by default


That tripped me up last time also. If I had seen your post earlier, I could have mentioned it (that and the fact you'll want a bigger swap than 127!  ).

Glad it worked out, and the contents of this thread will be useful for others in the future, I'm sure 

Matt.


----------



## B33K34 (Feb 9, 2003)

B33K34 said:


> I've ordered one of those - at that price it has to be worth a go.


Worked flawlessly with the Seagate Pipeline i took out of my Humax Foxsat HDR both in my PC and tivo.


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

in the end my TV blew up anyway.... I now have a 37" samsung LCD telly which seems huge.
Although it's a 1080P telly I've got no HD sources yet, but as I'm on virgin media I suppose a V+ box will be the way to go
currently the best picture on the samsung is built in freeview
DVD (scart) comes second
Tivo a close third
standard virgin media box gives a pretty poor picture on a 37"

anyway that's all off topic

I'm also finding that the menus on my tivo are quite slow with this 1T drive.
I have a cache card with 512Mb ram in it

is there anything I should check (I can telnet in) to see why menus are so slow?


----------



## jeremy Parsons (Jan 6, 2002)

I upgraded to the WD Green 750Gb Drive is worked flawlessly , the biggest issue was the drive in tivo we so knackered I had to backup the season pass and the hack directory restore the previous image I had from a previous upgrade.

I used the reccomended SATA adapters specified on this site and after the messing around to recover the season passes it all went like a dream.

The picture quality is greatly improved , that makes tivo 1 on the 4th set of disks, 40gb fireball , 2 x 120Gb maxstore and then 2 x 200GB Segate Barricuda and now 750GB WD Green Hard disk


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

is your menu navigation slow?


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

this is all the stuff from tivoweb

TiVo Box Information
Software System:	2.5.5-01-1-023
Service Number:	********************
System Type:	United Kingdom Series 1 Stand-Alone
Tuner Count:	1
Remote Address	0
Uptime	1d 22h 04m 49s
Current Temperature:	37C / 98.6F
Kernel Information

Version 2.1.24-TiVo-2.5
Compile #14 Wed Oct 8 12:06:25 MDT 2003

Memory Information

Memory Statistics:
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 14151680 13434880 716800 69742592 65536 3477504
Swap: 524279808 3825664 520454144
MemTotal: 13820 kB
MemFree: 700 kB
MemShared: 68108 kB
Buffers: 64 kB
Cached: 3396 kB
SwapTotal: 511992 kB
SwapFree: 508256 kB

File System/Disk Information

Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda4 ext2 124M 16M 101M 14&#37; /
/dev/hda9 ext2 124M 9.5M 108M 8% /var

/dev/hda:
multcount = 0 (off)
I/O support = 0 (default 16-bit)
using_dma = 1 (on)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 16383/16/63, sectors = 1953525168, start = 0
drive state is: active/idle

Device: WDC WD10EACS-65D6B0 Supports ATA Version 8
Drive supports S.M.A.R.T. and is enabled
Check S.M.A.R.T. Passed

User Space
Expired Guide 1 8 MB 0.0% 0:30:00
Expired Season Pass 69 90750 MB 9.5% 67:25:00
Expired Bookmark 1 2676 MB 0.3% 1:30:00
Expired Suggestion 417 700143 MB 73.5% 269:55:00
Expired By Name 9 19028 MB 2.0% 9:50:00
By Name 14 8985 MB 0.9% 11:45:00
Suggestion 62 88279 MB 9.3% 37:30:00
Season Pass 3 5088 MB 0.5% 3:00:00
Live Cache 1 1632 MB 0.2% 0:38:17
In Progress 1 1024 MB 0.1% 0:11:28
Used User Space 578 917613 MB 96.3% 402:14:45
Reserved Space
Used Reserved Space 0 0 MB 0.0% 0:00:00
Space Summary
Total Space - 952460 MB 100.0% -
Total Used 578 917613 MB 96.3% 402:14:45
Total Free - Best - 34847 MB 3.7% -
Deleted** 7 25004 MB 2.6% 9:05:00


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

can anyone tell me why my menus are so slow?
doing anything that accesses the database, like scheduling a recording seems to freeze the menus for ages
It wasn't like that with the old drive
anyone?


----------



## DX30 (May 22, 2005)

dieselnutjob said:


> can anyone tell me why my menus are so slow?


At a guess it's because you have a 1TB drive with lots of programmes recorded. The more you have the slower things get. Try deleting anything you don't want to keep. I know it seems a bit of a waste not to use the whole 1TB but you'll need to find the balance of speed vs capacity you are happy with.


----------



## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

dieselnutjob said:


> can anyone tell me why my menus are so slow?
> doing anything that accesses the database, like scheduling a recording seems to freeze the menus for ages
> 
> It wasn't like that with the old drive


I have been using 2 x Samsung HA250JC drives so 500Gb capacity in total for the last four years. Due to pathetic acceptance of bad picture quality on my part and a sad liking for recording lots of films and other programs that I rarely have time to watch I also continues using Basic. So my Tivo has about 650 recordings on it and the recording capacity is I think 613 hours or something at Basic. I also have a Cachecard with 512MB of RAM.

Menu operations are a lot slower on the Tivo than before and you often have to wait 3 or 4 seconds for page ups and page downs but programs play and skip as normaly. I suppose in the end I have grown accustomed to it and I mainly cope with the annoyance of the long delay by doing all substantial Tivo maintenance like deleting a lot of recordings at once or scheduling a lot of new recordings by doing them via Tivoweb. The delay scenario just doesn't happen over on Tivoweb with completing these multiple operations.

If you record everything at Best that ought to limit you to 350 hours and with a Cachecard and 512MB of RAM things shouldn't get that slow. I thought much over 300 recordings was where the big slow down started to happen so long as you have a Cachecard and 512MB of RAM. Without it the big slow down happens over 150 recordings on the Tivo.

I will upgrade to 1.5TB Samsung or something one day if the HA250JCs ever die (4 years 3 months now and still going strong) before the Tivo service in the UK does and I suppose if I use Best or Mode 0 for everything that will be 525 hours so shouldn't be any slower than my current setup.

Are your recording everthing in Best to keep your total recording capacity down to no more than 350 hours?


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

I'm recording most things at best (there might be the odd repeating schedule that I haven't updated)
the drive is full at just under 600 programs
I am may well swap the drive with the 270G from my samba server that is getting full. It would still give me 150 programs on best I suppose, which is probably enough
at least I know what is causing the problem


----------



## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

dieselnutjob said:


> I'm recording most things at best (there might be the odd repeating schedule that I haven't updated)
> the drive is full at just under 600 programs
> 
> I am may well swap the drive with the 270G from my samba server that is getting full. It would still give me 150 programs on best I suppose, which is probably enough


600 recordings in Now Playing definitely causes a big slow down and cannot be avoided, even with a Cachecard and 512MB of RAM. You must be recording a lot of short series rather than say long F1 Grand Prix programs to get that many recordings on the machine recording only at Best.

You don't want to really exceed much more than 300 recordings in Now Playing to avoid things slowing down with a Cachecard and 512MB of RAM.


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

I looked at the drive in my Samba server. It's Western Digital WD3000JB 300G which seems to have quite a nice spec for a Tivo.
I think that I would rather have a snappy responding TiVo than 600 programs I'll never watch.
Now some questions....
I guess that I can clone from the 1T drive to a smaller 300G provided that I don't copy any programs. But there are some programs that I would like to keep. I'm happy to burn them onto DVD though.
I could copy them over the network whilst the 1T drive is still there.
On the other hand if I put the 1T drive into my Debian Linux desktop PC could I read the programs straight off the hard drive somehow?
The last time I copied programs onto my PC I had to use XP and I think tytools.
Is there a tytools for linux?


----------



## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

dieselnutjob said:


> On the other hand if I put the 1T drive into my Debian Linux desktop PC could I read the programs straight off the hard drive somehow?


If you extract them with ty you know what then you should be able to play the ty files directly on a PC using VLC Media Player, which is very good Freeware. I would hope there is also a version of that for Linux.

I don't know if there is a version of Ty you know what for Linux. I'm sure mikerr and blindlemon know but what has happened to blindlemon. I haven't seen him post on the forum for ages.


----------



## iankb (Oct 9, 2000)

Pete77 said:


> ... but what has happened to blindlemon. I haven't seen him post on the forum for ages.


He posted this last Wednesday.


----------



## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

iankb said:


> He posted this last Wednesday.


But the one before that was 17th October and the one before that was 7th September

This is very different from the blindlemon of old. I can only assume he has had to go out and get a proper job or something.


----------



## dieselnutjob (Apr 6, 2005)

i think that you misunderstood me
I can easily boot XP and use tytools to drag programs over the network
even if I couldn't boot XP apparently tytools runs well in wine
the problem is that it's going to be a long, long transfer I think

I am just wondering if I can take the drive out of the tivo and read the video files directly over the SATA cable. It would require my desktop to understand the partitions and file system of the tivo drive though

also
is there a way to keep my program preferences, setup and hacks etc but just not copy the programs when going from a large drive to a smaller one?


----------



## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

dieselnutjob said:


> I am just wondering if I can take the drive out of the tivo and read the video files directly over the SATA cable. It would require my desktop to understand the partitions and file system of the tivo drive though


Basically no.



dieselnutjob said:


> is there a way to keep my program preferences, setup and hacks etc but just not copy the programs when going from a large drive to a smaller one?


Yes, just do a "shrunk/truncated" backup:

*mfsbackup -l32 -so - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 300 -r4 -zxpi - /dev/hdc*


----------



## Ashley (Apr 20, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> But the one before that was 17th October and the one before that was 7th September
> 
> This is very different from the blindlemon of old. I can only assume he has had to go out and get a proper job or something.


Back to being a blues singer?


----------



## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> But the one before that was 17th October and the one before that was 7th September
> 
> This is very different from the blindlemon of old. I can only assume he has had to go out and get a proper job or something.


Actually, amazingly enough, I found something to do (not a proper job, don't worry) that's more interesting than bickering with you on this forum 

There's not a lot going on here these days but I do check back every so often to see if I'm missing something. Usually I'm not.


----------

