# 4 TB Tivos at Weaknees



## bobfrank (Mar 17, 2005)

Weaknees is now selling 4tb, single drive, Roamios. 630 hours of HD.

$600 to $750 depending on which Roamio, basic, plus or pro.


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## Keen (Aug 3, 2009)

They should have sent a poet. It's so beautiful.


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## tbielowicz (Apr 16, 2009)

Has anyone tried to just install a 4TB drive and see if it works? It may be that simple.


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## bobfrank (Mar 17, 2005)

Yes, there have been several attempts to use a 4tb drive to upgrade. Until now none were successful. Upgrading to 3tb is basically automatic. 4tb apparently requires some additional magic.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

bobfrank said:


> Weaknees is now selling 4tb, single drive, Roamios. 630 hours of HD.
> 
> $600 to $750 depending on which Roamio, basic, plus or pro.


Their pricing seems a little weird. They have a Roamio Plus with a 4TB drive for $720 and a Romaio Pro with a 4TB drive for $750. The only difference between the two is the initial hard drive size. And you don't get the original drive with it when you have them put in one 4TB drive.


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## Devx (Jun 1, 2006)

aaronwt said:


> Their pricing seems a little weird. They have a Roamio Plus with a 4TB drive for $720 and a Romaio Pro with a 4TB drive for $750. The only difference between the two is the initial hard drive size. And you don't get the original drive with it when you have them put in one 4TB drive.


That's in line with their pricing on the Plus upgrades though. The difference with the Pro is that the "Pro" wording on the front costs $30, per Weaknees that is.


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## anthonymoody (Apr 29, 2008)

I bought a 2TB Plus from them. 

Have to admit that even though by all accounts the Plus and Pro are exactly the same but for inbuilt storage, I'm a touch worried that at some point down the road I will regret that I didn't stretch and get the Pro as TiVo in the future may choose to unlock via software some feature(s) in the Pro that leave the Plus out in the cold, as a way to further differentiate the two models.


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## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

anthonymoody said:


> I bought a 2TB Plus from them.
> 
> Have to admit that even though by all accounts the Plus and Pro are exactly the same but for inbuilt storage, I'm a touch worried that at some point down the road I will regret that I didn't stretch and get the Pro as TiVo in the future may choose to unlock via software some feature(s) in the Pro that leave the Plus out in the cold, as a way to further differentiate the two models.


While that may be possible, I would hope that they would not do such a thing, it would really piss some people off, right now the only reason you would chose a pro is addl storage, not future proofing additional enhancements.


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## anthonymoody (Apr 29, 2008)

cr33p said:


> While that may be possible, I would hope that they would not do such a thing, it would really piss some people off, right now the only reason you would chose a pro is addl storage, not future proofing additional enhancements.


100% agreed!


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

anthonymoody said:


> I bought a 2TB Plus from them.
> 
> Have to admit that even though by all accounts the Plus and Pro are exactly the same but for inbuilt storage, I'm a touch worried that at some point down the road I will regret that I didn't stretch and get the Pro as TiVo in the future may choose to unlock via software some feature(s) in the Pro that leave the Plus out in the cold, as a way to further differentiate the two models.


"Unlocking" different features was never done on the TiVo HD/TiVo HDXL, Premiere/Premiere XL, & Premiere 4/Premiere XL4 twins so we have a pretty good track record. So while doing so is technically possible, it certainly is not what we have seen in the past and would cause TiVo all sorts of problems.


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## zalusky (Apr 5, 2002)

Of course all the previous systems never had any excess power.

Now I am wondering about things like in app purchasing ala the iPhone.
The future might get interesting.


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## bobfrank (Mar 17, 2005)

I do remember that although the HD and the HDXL seemed the same, except for the disk size that the XL was able to be upgraded to a larger disk than the HD could.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

bobfrank said:


> I do remember that although the HD and the HDXL seemed the same, except for the disk size that the XL was able to be upgraded to a larger disk than the HD could.


Both can be upgraded to 2TB (1 hard drive). There were/are 2 drive options that went further perhaps there was a difference there I don't know.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

Just for the fun of it I check weakness pricing. I looked at the Roamio Pro 4TB at $750 which is $150 more than the stock 3TB version and they extend the warranty to 180 days from 90. Seems reasonable when I factor in labor and the warranty. 

But they do get to keep the 3TB drive and they get $170 for it as an upgrade in a Roamio Plus or $250 for it in a basic Roamio. 

So for their cost of one 4TB drive, labor to change 2 drives, & providing the warranties on 2 units they are getting $320- $400 (plus normal markup) and still have either a 1TB or 500GB drive left. 

Guess that still sounds reasonable to me overall but I don't think the basic Roamio buyer is getting a very good deal given how easy doing your own upgrade is.


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## cr33p (Jan 2, 2005)

atmuscarella said:


> "Unlocking" different features was never done on the TiVo HD/TiVo HDXL, Premiere/Premiere XL, & Premiere 4/Premiere XL4 twins so we have a pretty good track record. So while doing so is technically possible, it certainly is not what we have seen in the past and would cause TiVo all sorts of problems.


Hell, getting promised features like a HD interface was hard enough, I cant imagine add ons,


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## bobfrank (Mar 17, 2005)

atmuscarella said:


> Both can be upgraded to 2TB (1 hard drive). There were/are 2 drive options that went further perhaps there was a difference there I don't know.


The sticky "Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ" in the Series 3 forum, paragraph 16 under the Introduction clearly states that the maximum usable space on the THD would be 1.26 TB for one internal drive.

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784

When I upgraded my THD and my HDXL I found that was the case. So unless newer software removed that limitation there was a difference on how much more space could be added with an internal drive upgrade.


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## Keen (Aug 3, 2009)

bobfrank said:


> The sticky "Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ" in the Series 3 forum, paragraph 16 under the Introduction clearly states that the maximum usable space on the THD would be 1.26 TB for one internal drive.


Look at when that post was last updated. I have a 2TB drive in my Tivo HD (non-XL) at home, and have had one for 3 years now.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

bobfrank said:


> The sticky "Drive Expansion and Drive Upgrade FAQ" in the Series 3 forum, paragraph 16 under the Introduction clearly states that the maximum usable space on the THD would be 1.26 TB for one internal drive.
> 
> http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784
> 
> When I upgraded my THD and my HDXL I found that was the case. So unless newer software removed that limitation there was a difference on how much more space could be added with an internal drive upgrade.


That info is out of date. I have personally upgrade my TiVo HD to 2TB, simple process. Same for Premiere and my understanding is the original Series 3 can now also be user upgraded to 2TB.


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## bobfrank (Mar 17, 2005)

That post was current when I did my upgrade. And at that time all the HD would recognize is 1.26 TB.

The post also says you can put in a 2TB drive, but it won't be all used.

I also indicated that there might have been software changes to allow larger drive usage since my upgrade.

How may hours of HD does your Tivo show as capacity? You may have a 2TB drive that is under utilized.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

I wonder if it's a trick? On the old units didn't they get past the 2TB limit by basically making the extra 1TB appear as if it were an external eSATA drive? And by doing so make it impossible to actually expand further by adding an eSATA drive? They're probably doing the same thing here. Except now the internal limit is 3TB.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

bobfrank said:


> That post was current when I did my upgrade. And at that time all the HD would recognize is 1.26 TB.
> 
> The post also says you can put in a 2TB drive, but it won't be all used.
> 
> ...


Read through the links in my last post. Both my Premiere and TiVO HD have 318 HD hrs. My Series 3 with it's original 250 GB and 1TB external drive only has 179 HD hrs.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

Dan203 said:


> I wonder if it's a trick? On the old units didn't they get past the 2TB limit by basically making the extra 1TB appear as if it were an external eSATA drive? And by doing so make it impossible to actually expand further by adding an eSATA drive? They're probably doing the same thing here. Except now the internal limit is 3TB.


Weaknees sells 4TB 2 disk solutions for the Premieres and for some of the S3 units. I wonder if they will be able to sell 6 or 8 TB 2 disk solutions for the Roamios?


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

atmuscarella said:


> Weaknees sells 4TB 2 disk solutions for the Premieres and for some of the S3 units. I wonder if they will be able to sell 6 or 8 TB 2 disk solutions for the Roamios?


They had already mentioned they got a 7TB solution working. This was before they got a 4TB internal working. So it was assumed the 7TB solution used a 4TB external along with the 3TB internal drive.


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## bobfrank (Mar 17, 2005)

atmuscarella said:


> Read through the links in my last post. Both my Premiere and TiVO HD have 318 HD hrs. My Series 3 with it's original 250 GB and 1TB external drive only has 179 HD hrs.


My HD only has 237 hours. Your HD is using all of a 2TB drive. That just means that between time in 2006 or 2007 when I upgraded my HD and the time when you upgraded yours that either Tivo made a change or new upgrade tools became available that allowed the use of the full 2TB.

This doesn't change my original comment that there could be differences in the Roamio Plus and Pro that we don't know about yet, just like there were differences in the HD and XL.

Some people are willing to pay the extra $30 to be safe.

Never got a Premiere so I can't comment on that, but I'm looking forward to my 4TB Roamio.


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## bobfrank (Mar 17, 2005)

aaronwt said:


> They had already mentioned they got a 7TB solution working. This was before they got a 4TB internal working. So it was assumed the 7TB solution used a 4TB external along with the 3TB internal drive.


On the Weaknees blog that say they have an 8TB, 2 drive, Tivo working and hope to have it on sale soon.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

So maybe it's not a trick.

Why would anyone need that much space?


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## Goober96 (Jun 28, 2005)

Dan203 said:


> So maybe it's not a trick.
> 
> Why would anyone need that much space?


I can remember saying that about my 30 MB hard drive in the 80s.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Goober96 said:


> I can remember saying that about my 30 MB hard drive in the 80s.


Yeah but unlike that situation we're talking about pretty static file sizes. In fact, if anything, video files are going to get smaller in the future as we transition to H.264. So that 8GB of storage is going to always hold 1200+ hours of HD video, and could get up to 1700+ with H.264. That's enough to hold the entire season of 50+ TV shows. At a certain point you're accumulating stuff you'll never even have time to watch.


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

Dan203 said:


> Yeah but unlike that situation we're talking about pretty static file sizes. In fact, if anything, video files are going to get smaller in the future as we transition to H.264. So that 8GB of storage is going to always hold 1200+ hours of HD video, and could get up to 1700+ with H.264. That's enough to hold the entire season of 50+ TV shows. At a certain point you're accumulating stuff you'll never even have time to watch.


For most people your correct but some people like to have everything even though they will never watch all of it, I have to admit my family was like that when we changed to TiVos from VCRs I dumped (after a year) 4 or 5 big bags of VCR tapes and all (but one) VCR that is now not connected. So with TiVo they have to be more efficient as they can't just purchase another VCR tape for more storage.


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## Keen (Aug 3, 2009)

bobfrank said:


> My HD only has 237 hours. Your HD is using all of a 2TB drive. That just means that between time in 2006 or 2007 when I upgraded my HD and the time when you upgraded yours that either Tivo made a change or new upgrade tools became available that allowed the use of the full 2TB.
> 
> This doesn't change my original comment that there could be differences in the Roamio Plus and Pro that we don't know about yet, just like there were differences in the HD and XL.


It entirely undermines your original comment:


bobfrank said:


> I do remember that although the HD and the HDXL seemed the same, except for the disk size that the XL was able to be upgraded to a larger disk than the HD could.


That difference was purely due to people not reverse engineering ways to expand non-XL drives as large as they could make XL drives. An entirely 3rd-party software limitation (as opposed to a hardware one) that was eventually overcome. The HD and the HDXL were identical. It just took longer to figure out how to expand the stock filesystem of an HD.

At the moment, it looks like the Roamio is the same situation, except weaknees (and the hackers here, it seems like) are figuring out the filesystem faster, and so there's zero difference between the expansion potentials of all 3 Roamio models.

But hey, you keep handwaving that there's some merit to your original comment, just like you have done for all of this discussion.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Dan203 said:


> Yeah but unlike that situation we're talking about pretty static file sizes. In fact, if anything, video files are going to get smaller in the future as we transition to H.264. So that 8GB of storage is going to always hold 1200+ hours of HD video, and could get up to 1700+ with H.264. That's enough to hold the entire season of 50+ TV shows. At a certain point you're accumulating stuff you'll never even have time to watch.


I'm already at 65% of storage used on my Pro. A 4TB drive would be nice, but not at a $150 premium for the extra 1TB. Plus the My Shows list is now so long. I really hope TiVo implements profiles or something to help me control the list. Because just to find something from a week ago now takes more time than ever. I couldn't imagine filling up 8TB of storage with the current way the space is managed.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

Dan203 said:


> So maybe it's not a trick.
> 
> Why would anyone need that much space?


I record *virtually* everything in SD for disk space reasons. With that much space (or actually 4TB), I might actually record most of the main primetime in HD.

Though I admit nowadays I'm mostly just offloading things instead (though I did manage to kill a drive with tons of recordings.. at least most of it that I remember was musical shows and stuff I didn't care about *too* much). In the past, I have kept things seasons old, and gone back and caught up (I did catch up on a bunch of stuff from that drive I then killed -- I was carelessly using it as a bare drive connected to an adapter, and jostled it or something.. tried to recover, lots of I/O errors).


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

aaronwt said:


> I couldn't imagine filling up 8TB of storage with the current way the space is managed.


I remember back before they added groups. Even with a 30 hour unit that list got crazy.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

Dan203 said:


> Yeah but unlike that situation we're talking about pretty static file sizes. In fact, if anything, video files are going to get smaller in the future as we transition to H.264. So that 8GB of storage is going to always hold 1200+ hours of HD video, and could get up to 1700+ with H.264. That's enough to hold the entire season of 50+ TV shows. At a certain point you're accumulating stuff you'll never even have time to watch.


True, but there is also the benefit of building your own VOD library. With enough space you can record whatever looks remotely interesting and worry later if you watch it or not.

I do this with more and more shows now. I tend to park them until I feel like watching them or giving them a try.


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## Devx (Jun 1, 2006)

innocentfreak said:


> True, but there is also the benefit of building your own VOD library. With enough space you can record whatever looks remotely interesting and worry later if you watch it or not.
> 
> *I do this with more and more shows now. I tend to park them until I feel like watching them or giving them a try.*


This. Especially for shows that look marginal or seem destined for cancellation, record it, just in case. Then if it survives, no harm done, and it can be watched from the beginning. Networks are so quick to cancel shows nowadays.

Also, with 6 tuners, the 4+TB units could be useful for larger families and unconventional households. How they sort through that list or resolve tuner conflict is another matter entirely.


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