# Which Hard Drive to upgrade with?



## OrangeDrink (Feb 10, 2004)

I may have asked this before, I'd like to upgrade my US Series 1 Tivo's Hard Drive and there's a readily available supply nearby of Seagate Series 9 and 10 Hard Drives. A friend of mine warned me off these though as he'd had problems installed one in a modded XBox, something about the Master Boot Record not being writeable? Not sure on the specifics but has anyone else had problems with these Seagates? I've chucked one in a MediaGate and it seemed to be fine with it, it also runs a version of Linux.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

OrangeDrink said:


> I may have asked this before, I'd like to upgrade my US Series 1 Tivo's Hard Drive and there's a readily available supply nearby of Seagate Series 9 and 10 Hard Drives. A friend of mine warned me off these though as he'd had problems installed one in a modded XBox, something about the Master Boot Record not being writeable? Not sure on the specifics but has anyone else had problems with these Seagates? I've chucked one in a MediaGate and it seemed to be fine with it, it also runs a version of Linux.


The Seagate 7200.9 and 7200.10 series drives have a very demanding power supply requirement which means they are not suitable for use as dual drive installations in our Tivo Series 1 (there is not enough power for the two drives to start). 7200.8 and earlier series from Seagate were suitable for dual drive installations in our Tivo S1 Thomson model.

blindlemon of TivoHeaven fame particularly likes Samsung drives because they are quiet, reliable and run cool. He especially likes the Samsung HA250JC 250gb drive which is a 5400rpm drive released last year but now deleted and only available from www.ultratec.co.uk I have two of these in my Tivo.

Samsung now produce a 400Gb IDE/PATA drive and already have a 500Gb SATA drive on offer so the IDE/PATA versions surely can't be far behind.

Basically the general view in this forum is pro Seagate (5 year warranty through some UK supply chains) and Samsung (3 year warranty through all supply chains) drives and against Western Digital, Hitachi and Maxtor drives which only have a 1 year warranty and are considered more noisy and unreliable (Maxtors considered as being especially unreliable although recently acquired by Seagate of course).

However Seagate are now beginning to rule themselves out due to the excess power consumption issue.

I hope this is some help.


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## OrangeDrink (Feb 10, 2004)

Pete77 said:


> The Seagate 7200.9 and 7200.10 series drives have a very demanding power supply requirement which means they are not suitable for use as dual drive installations in our Tivo Series 1 (there is not enough power for the two drives to start). 7200.8 and earlier series from Seagate were suitable for dual drive installations in our Tivo S1 Thomson model.
> 
> blindlemon of TivoHeaven fame particularly likes Samsung drives because they are quiet, reliable and run cool. He especially likes the Samsung HA250JC 250gb drive which is a 5400rpm drive released last year but now deleted and only available from www.ultratec.co.uk I have two of these in my Tivo.
> 
> ...


That's actually great Pete, if those Samsung drives are over a year old and now deleted they should be arriving anyday in New Zealand  As a backup though there's simply not enough on TV out here to justify having 2 drives I might just go for a single Seagate.10... unless I decide to start archiving the Rugby Channel  heheh


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

OrangeDrink said:


> That's actually great Pete, if those Samsung drives are over a year old and now deleted they should be arriving anyday in New Zealand  As a backup though there's simply not enough on TV out here to justify having 2 drives I might just go for a single Seagate.10... unless I decide to start archiving the Rugby Channel  heheh


And there was I thinking that Korea where Samsung is based is a fair bit nearer to NZ than the homeland of our shared Sovereign. The point about the HA250JC drive is that it was allegedly designed as a PVR specific model in terms of spin speed and coolness etc. However Samsung haven't carried on the series and have gone back to all 7200rpm 3.5" drives.

As to not having enough on tv in NZ to fill up a large hard drive surely these days you must have access to literally hundreds of satellite channels or are the majority of satellites in your hemisphere only carrying channels in languages you can't begin to understand? I suppose the combined population of Australia and NZ is still only half that of the UK. But what about broadband television - that will surely soon give you full access to all the programs of the English speaking world - barring any issues with the licensing and charging arrangements for such non NZ channels of course.

The advice of the learned blindlemon (of www.tivoheaven.co.uk fame) is in any case to have only one drive in a Tivo wherever possible as this statistically reduces the total chances of hard drive failure. He, as I believe a non statistician, alleges that it halves the total chances of hard drive failure, although I would maintain as one with a statistical background that this is not straightforward as it seems as the chances of any drive failure in the first 18 months of a drive's life are so comparatively small that the chances of two failing in the same period are almost non existent. And since most drives fail between 2 years and 5 years old the modal (most frequent) time to failure is probably not doubled at any one point in time by having only one drive but probably only extended by 25% to 30%. However blindlemon will probably also argue that the fact that two drives run a lot hotter together increases the risk of failure even further.

Seagate have developed a drive series that goes under the name DB35 which are actually 7200.2 and 7200.3 series (even though only recently released) which they maintain are specifically designed for PVR use. These now run up to 750Gb in size. However blindlemon says most of the extra PVR specific drive control features are not able to be utiliised by our now aged Tivo motherboard and chipset. Also the power supply issue (not enough power available) with having two drives apparently still applies to this series.

Of course Hitachi have just announced a 1 Terrabyte drive but most on here feel it will probably be noisy and have a short lifetime compared to anything from Seagate or Samsung.

Whatever drive you pick will of course be out evolved by somthing better that comes along next month.............


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## Blacque Jacque (Dec 26, 2006)

Just to add a small point to Pete77's post:

If your Seagate drive has a 5ys manufacturers warranty they will honour it through the factory with proof of purchase, so keep those receipts folks


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> it seems as the chances of any drive failure in the first 18 months of a drive's life are so comparatively small that the chances of two failing in the same period are almost non existent


Unfortunately it only takes one of your two drives to fail to render your TiVo inoperative, so the increased risk of this happening by fitting two drives instead of one is clearly worth considering.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> Unfortunately it only takes one of your two drives to fail to render your TiVo inoperative, so the increased risk of this happening by fitting two drives instead of one is clearly worth considering.


What I meant though is that probably having two drives doesn't halve the typical time until failure as hardly any drives tend to fail before they are say 18 months old (one reason I imagine that TivoHeaven offers only a 12 month free of charge disk repreparation warranty rather than the 36 months that would tie up directly with the free repacement of the drive by Samsung under their warranty).

On the other hand over 18 months and especially over 36 months having two drives probably does double your chances of the Tivo failing on any given day. Of course with the way drive prices tend to fall by then its probably a good moment to upgrade drive capacity anyway although obviously with the penalty that you lose all of your existing recordings that you haven't archived off the machine.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Pete77 said:


> What I meant though is that probably having two drives doesn't halve the typical time until failure as hardly any drives tend to fail before they are say 18 months old


Not the case, as you would appreciate if you knew how many drives I have replaced in the last year 

Unfortunately, there is a small percentage of drives that fail after just a few weeks regardless of how much testing I do initially. I think that this is either down to a inherent weakness in what appears to be a healthy drive that's brought out by the thrashing they get in a TiVo, or maybe due to the rigours of being sent through the postal system 

IME, if a drive lasts a few months in a TiVo then it's likely to last a few years, but that doesn't alter the fact that having two in a TiVo increases your chances that _one_ of them will be one that fails prematurely.


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## Blacque Jacque (Dec 26, 2006)

It's called the bathtub curve. Electronic equipment generally fails at the beginning or end of it's planned lifecycle, the graph looks like a bathtub ( amazingly enough) 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> Unfortunately, there is a small percentage of drives that fail after just a few weeks regardless of how much testing I do initially. I think that this is either down to a inherent weakness in what appears to be a healthy drive that's brought out by the thrashing they get in a TiVo, or maybe due to the rigours of being sent through the postal system
> 
> IME, if a drive lasts a few months in a TiVo then it's likely to last a few years, but that doesn't alter the fact that having two in a TiVo increases your chances that _one_ of them will be one that fails prematurely.


OK its interesting to have this actual empirical rundown on failure rates.

So in general if they don't fail in the first 3 months most of them tend to last at least 18 months? Do you notice any difference between Seagate and Samsung in this tendency to fail very early on in their lives? Although I have experienced four different hard drive failures in nearly 20 years of computer use they all happened when the drive was several years old.

Whilst having two large drives in a Tivo is not your preferred configuration I imagine that if one is going to have two drives that the Samsung HA250JC would have been one of the very best possible choices due to cool running etc? Of course now it doesn't make any sense when cheap and quiet 400Gb drives are currently available and 500Gb will very soon I'm sure also be available from Samsung in an IDE version. But 19 months ago fitting two Samsung HA250JCs was a logical decision given the then problems of installing a drive larger than 300Gb as Drive A and 250Gb as Drive B.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Blacque Jacque said:


> It's called the bathtub curve. Electronic equipment generally fails at the beginning or end of it's planned lifecycle, the graph looks like a bathtub ( amazingly enough)
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve


My bathtub has much steeper sides than that one seems to.


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## Blacque Jacque (Dec 26, 2006)

Yeah but you'd never get it inside your TiVo


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## rwtomkins (Jul 14, 2003)

Pete77 said:


> My bathtub has much steeper sides than that one seems to.


To be pedantic, I believe they're not sides, but ends.


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## OrangeDrink (Feb 10, 2004)

Pete77 said:


> As to not having enough on tv in NZ to fill up a large hard drive surely these days you must have access to literally hundreds of satellite channels or are the majority of satellites in your hemisphere only carrying channels in languages you can't begin to understand?


Here's the total list of channels on Sky NZ excluding Box Office, Digital Radio and Chinese/Korean channels:

TV1
TV2
TV3
Prime
Sky1
UKTV
E!
Living
Maori Channel
Food Channel
Sky Sport1
Sky Sport2
Sky Sport3
ESPN
TAB Trackside
The Rugby Channel (which you have to get all the Sports channels to get!)
Sky Movies1
Sky Movies2
MGM
Rialto
TCM
5 MTV Clone stations
4 Children's Channels
6 Documentary/Nat Hist/Arts Channels
Sky News
BBC World
CNN
Fox News (which I'm currently trying to get removed from the airwaves due to flagrant breaches of the NZ Broadcasting code )

Not a big choice at all.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

Is this caused by it not being worth negotiating the rights for a nation of less than 2 million people for most less popular satellite channels? Couldn't they wrap up a joint rights deal for Australia and NZ? I suppose not in the same way that all the rights are negotiated separately for Ireland from the United Kingdom.


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## OrangeDrink (Feb 10, 2004)

Pete77 said:


> Is this caused by it not being worth negotiating the rights for a nation of less than 2 million people for most less popular satellite channels? Couldn't they wrap up a joint rights deal for Australia and NZ? I suppose not in the same way that all the rights are negotiated separately for Ireland from the United Kingdom.


They've no competition here at all so they're reluctant to do much I think. There's some crossover between NZ and OZ for sure, Prime is a common channel but has some local programming like News and the like. I'm sure Sky 1 is very similar in both countries and several of those channels like ESPN are International stations. The main Channels all run Infomercials overnight as well so there's really not that much on here! Mind you having watched some of the channels back in the UK I'm sort of glad there's fewer channels here


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

OrangeDrink said:


> They've no competition here at all so they're reluctant to do much I think. There's some crossover between NZ and OZ for sure, Prime is a common channel but has some local programming like News and the like. I'm sure Sky 1 is very similar in both countries and several of those channels like ESPN are International stations. The main Channels all run Infomercials overnight as well so there's really not that much on here! Mind you having watched some of the channels back in the UK I'm sort of glad there's fewer channels here


I never did establish whether your parents with the Virgin Tivo were in South Wales, UK or in New South Wales, Australia? 

As to the tv channels I think with broadband tv in due course you should be able to have whatever channels and programs you want so long as you are willing to pay for them. I'm surprised you don't appear to have things like Discovery channel and National Geographic down in NZ though. Whereabouts in NZ are you?


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## OrangeDrink (Feb 10, 2004)

Pete77 said:


> I never did establish whether your parents with the Virgin Tivo were in South Wales, UK or in New South Wales, Australia?
> 
> As to the tv channels I think with broadband tv in due course you should be able to have whatever channels and programs you want so long as you are willing to pay for them. I'm surprised you don't appear to have things like Discovery channel and National Geographic down in NZ though. Whereabouts in NZ are you?


We've got those 2 Channels, I just included them in the "6 Documentary Channels".

It goes like this:

I'm in Wellington, New Zealand with as yet unconnected/not upgraded US Sony Series 1 TiVo.
Parents are in S Wales, UK and they have my old UK Thomson TiVo with a lifetime Subscription on it.

The problem with Broadband TV might well be the speed of downloading here for lots of people in NZ. Where I live, in the City Centre you can rarely get Cable Access, just Broadband but broadband here isn't very broad at all. They've only recently introduced unlimited download packages on Broadband and they've throttled many things like peer to peer clients down to modem speed between 4pm and 12am. Until they improve that Broadband TV might be problematic here. I am quite excited by the possibility of being able to download BBC Documentaries and Channel 4 News though. Got my fingers crossed!


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

OrangeDrink said:


> I'm in Wellington, New Zealand with as yet unconnected/not upgraded US Sony Series 1 TiVo.
> 
> Parents are in S Wales, UK and they have my old UK Thomson TiVo with a lifetime Subscription on it.
> 
> The problem with Broadband TV might well be the speed of downloading here for lots of people in NZ. I am quite excited by the possibility of being able to download BBC Documentaries and Channel 4 News though. Got my fingers crossed!


OK so I understand the full picture now. So this means you are a dedicated UK Tivoer who has moved to NZ and left the Lifetime Subbed Tivo with the parents and then missing Tivo are trying to go down the hard path of becoming part of the Australia/NZ Tivo hacker community.

Is it actually possible to get anything resembling a meaningful service on the Tivo that way do you think and while obviously a daily or weekly manual recording is going to work have they actually managed to create anything close to the service enjoyed here in the UK or in the USA. Still I suppose we can't discuss that in too much detail here. You can always send me a PM with any details that you think may be too explicit to discuss on the forum. 

Also does the Sky service there have a Sky+ variant as yet and have they gone down the digital terrestrial/Freeview tv route so far? I suppose what I'm leading up to is whether there are basically no adequate near substitutes for Tivo type recording as yet? What about Windows MCE? Can that be deployed in any meaningful way? Presumably not if Murdoch is once again refusing to play ball on his encryption card being put inside anybody else's tuner?

By the way is your posting to NZ a permanent one and can you recommend the place compared to life back in the UK?


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## OrangeDrink (Feb 10, 2004)

Pete77 said:


> Is it actually possible to get anything resembling a meaningful service on the Tivo that way do you think and while obviously a daily or weekly manual recording is going to work have they actually managed to create anything close to the service enjoyed here in the UK or in the USA. Still I suppose we can't discuss that in too much detail here. You can always send me a PM with any details that you think may be too explicit to discuss on the forum.
> 
> Also does the Sky service there have a Sky+ variant as yet and have they gone down the digital terrestrial/Freeview tv route so far? I suppose what I'm leading up to is whether there are basically no adequate near substitutes for Tivo type recording as yet? What about Windows MCE? Can that be deployed in any meaningful way? Presumably not if Murdoch is once again refusing to play ball on his encryption card being put inside anybody else's tuner?
> 
> By the way is your posting to NZ a permanent one and can you recommend the place compared to life back in the UK?


Nail on the head. There's no official TiVo service down here so I can't see why Tivo would have anything to say about people down here using the old machines with their own EPG, if there's a problem with that then forget I mentioned it I shall merely be using it as a VCR replacement 

We have MySky which is exactly the same as Sky+ and therefore equally crap with all the inherent problems of Season passes not working, scheduled recordings going missing, only being able to look a week ahead etc etc etc. I've got it, it's hopeless which is why I got an old US TiVo. Windows MCE I have no idea about, I know a couple of computer shops selling Windows Media Centre Computers but don't know much details about em. Freeview is planned here but as I understand it there's a big spanner thrown into the works as the new Optus D1 satellite they threw up has the polarity the wrong way round so our bandwidth hasn't increased here over and above what the old satellite could provide meaning that might affect Freeview here. There are services like GBPVR which I think work here and provide EPGs, in fact I seem to remember someone telling me the guy who originally wrote GBPVR is from Wellington. Don't know anyone with it though.

As for NZ I love it, beautiful country, largely stress free (except for the drivers!), best of all the company I work for pays US rates to us so we can really take advantage of that lower cost of living here


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## OrangeDrink (Feb 10, 2004)

Hey Pete if you wanna join the fun try here:

http://forums.oztivo.net/indexf.php

there's a dedicated NZ forum off the OzTivo forums. Amongst other things someone pointed out the Seagate drive problem with series 9 and 10 may not have been a power problem (as one of the mods says they tested them with an external PSU and got the same problem) they reckon it's an interface design problem that affects some ATA33 machines like TiVo. According to the mod there they've been on to Seagate and they could be addressing the problem in future drives.


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## Pete77 (Aug 1, 2006)

OrangeDrink said:


> Hey Pete if you wanna join the fun try here:
> 
> http://forums.oztivo.net/indexf.php
> 
> there's a dedicated NZ forum off the OzTivo forums. Amongst other things someone pointed out the Seagate drive problem with series 9 and 10 may not have been a power problem (as one of the mods says they tested them with an external PSU and got the same problem) they reckon it's an interface design problem that affects some ATA33 machines like TiVo. According to the mod there they've been on to Seagate and they could be addressing the problem in future drives.


Thanks for the link to the OzTivo site. Something interesting there about fan control software for the Tivo S1 but then the website it linked to didn't exist.

I have posted your comments that the OzTivo guys think the failure of latest Seagate 7200.9/7200.10 drives to support two drives in a Tivo may be an incompatibility problem in their design rather than a power supply issue in the thread that is discussing the Tivo S1 power supply.

As to NZ I would like to visit it some time as have never got to NZ or Australia so far due to always needing to make it a big trip. I wish I had a company who could post me to Australasia for a couple of years.


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