# Tivo no longer supports external hard drives (2017-June) ?



## sdawson (Aug 18, 2016)

Well, this is an odd twist for Tivo.

Last Fall I purchased a Tivo Romio OTA and the 1 TB external hard disk.

I want to purchase another for another part of the house, same setup.

I can not find the 1TB external storage on the Tivo web site, so I started a chat with Tivo support.

Here is the conversation, my typos and all.


I want to purchase another Tivo Roamio OTA, plus the 1TB external hard drive.

10:32:03 AM
I can not find the external hard drive on the web site to add to my cart.

10:32:14 AM
Rochel
We no longer support external hard drives.

10:33:49 AM
Me
But there is an esata on the Roamio OTA designed to plug in a 1TB drive. I purchased one from you for this same product less than a year ago. So do you not sell them or has the designe of the Roamio changed such that they do not work with one?

10:35:12 AM
That is, can I purhase one off of Amazon and use it if I were to purchase the Tivo Roamio OTA 1 TB such that I will havfe 2 TB total for storage

10:36:01 AM
Rochel
We do not sell them anymore. We stopped supporting hard drives just earlier this year.

10:36:59 AM
You can try, but we can't guarantee you that it'll work.

10:37:24 AM
Me
Ok. Well can you give feedback to managemant that this is disappointing. 1TB does not go very far with HD programming. Thank you for the information.


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## sdawson (Aug 18, 2016)

OK, perhaps I should have searched better first. Am reading threads related to this issue.


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## kpeters59 (Jun 19, 2007)

You are aware how easy it is to upgrade the internal drive on a Roamio, aren't you?

KMTTG would transfer most of your settings to the new drive, if necessary.

Then get a NAS to 'archive' shows you want to keep and use PyTiVoDesktop to shuffle back and forth...

-KP


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## waynomo (Nov 9, 2002)

Yeah. Swapping out the drive is easy. Buy a larger drive and save yourself some money over the TiVo external drive.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

Did you know that using any external drive on a Tivo and you run a high risk of losing all your recorded shows if anything, from the external drive, casing, cable, etc., fail.

Tivo does not store shows the same way as a PC does. Its spread across both drives, parts on the internal, others on external.

A safer way is to upgrade the internal drive. Without a PC, you can upgrade to 3TB (cheaper than the Tivo supported drive, no longer produced) and up to 8 TB with a PC and a program.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

kpeters59 said:


> Pretty sure *ThAbtO* meant internal drive...
> 
> -KP


Corrected.


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## series5orpremier (Jul 6, 2013)

In a way they never really supported external drives. Their 1TB extender was always an inferior solution with high failure rates. A total waste of money.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

To the Original Poster: I think what they told you is a little misleading. If you have the actual supported external drive and plug it in, it will work just fine. What has actually happened is Western Digital has long ago stopped making the supported drive and TiVo has run out of supply and decided to not bother finding another drive to support.


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## sdawson (Aug 18, 2016)

Thanks for all of your replies folks.

Yes I was aware that if one drive dies, all recordings are lost, as the media is placed across both drives. I have doubled the risk of losing date by adding the external hard drive.

I went with my current Roamio OTA + external drive from Tivo about a year ago, and have been happy with it. I chose it partly as it was a Tivo solution, so would be covered by their warranty. Another part was ease of configuration.

I am looking at adding another Romaio OTA to my house, and wanted to take advantage of the Flash sale, but have decided otherwise due to the lack of the external hard drive.

So I am now considering both 1) getting a Roamio OTA and either upgrading the internal hard drive myself, or just purchasing one from Weaknees, and 2) looking at the NAS backup solution.

It looks like PyTivoDesktop has a Mac OS port, which I would need. I need to investigate this more. But I really do not want to spend a boat load of my time shuffling content between the NAS drive and the Tivo. As the Tivo is wireless, I also had some concerns about the bandwidth and workability of the NAS drive there. I think I will go with 1) first and then do more research on 2).

Regarding the 'lifetime' schedule service that comes with the Roamio OTA, I was a bit concerned that this may also be voided if I replace the internal hard drive myself. Can someone fill me in here on whether this is a concern or not?

-Shawn

P.S.

I love the Tivo software. The switching of the guide content provider last fall was troublesome, and the current guide is 'adequate' but not as good as the old content.

However, I do have concerns that Tivo is not spending money on whatever engineering is necessary to allow customers to both 1) order a TIVO with a lot more internal hard disk space directly from them and 2) have abandoned the external solution. This seem like a lack of vision on their part. A shame from a pioneer in this field. I hope their management turns things around, but who knows.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

Upgrading the drive is like starting off from a clean slate, and just need to run Guided Setup.
The lifetime service is with the service number and not the device itself.

Recommended is the WD Red 30EFRX 3TB drive - just drop it in to replace.
The price would be a bit less than the external 1TB Tivo drive.


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## sdawson (Aug 18, 2016)

Thanks all of you, especially to those who posted links and recommendations for the WD30EFRX drive. I have now ordereed the Roamio OTA for the flash sale price and have the drive ordered from Amazon. I am on travel this week, then head off for 4th of July Camping on Friday, the day the TIVO is set to arrive. So will not be able to put these together til the after the 4th. 

This will give me two Roamio OTA's in the house, one upstairs and one downstairs.

Next, will research adding a NAS system for archiving, perhaps this Fall or next Spring. Need to find a good thread to start the researdh there. I will have some questions there I expect. 

You all were quit helpful.

-Shawn


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## CharlesH (Aug 29, 2002)

ThAbtO said:


> Tivo does not store shows the same way as a PC does. Its spread across both drives, parts on the internal, others on external.


As I have often heard it, TiVo was compelled to spread programs over both drives to satisfy CableLabs or some such content intellectual property protection rules, to make it impossible to move the contents on the external drive to another device. I am sure that if it were an engineering decision, they would have put entire programs on one drive or the other.


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## UCLABB (May 29, 2012)

CharlesH said:


> As I have often heard it, TiVo was compelled to spread programs over both drives to satisfy CableLabs or some such content intellectual property protection rules, to make it impossible to move the contents on the external drive to another device. I am sure that if it were an engineering decision, they would have put entire programs on one drive or the other.


You're probably right. I had a cable company DVR a number of years ago that allowed the user to add an external drive and it was the same deal, programs spread over both drives.


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## mattack (Apr 9, 2001)

I didn't read the whole thread in detail.. Though it's certainly nowhere near as easy as having built in Tivo storage, for non-copy-protected shows, it is fairly easy to use a computer to copy to an external drive (or NAS), then use pytivo to copy (or stream) back to the Tivo. I sure wish there were a way to do this automatically, or heck, even manually -- similar to the Playstation's "move to external storage".


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## kpeters59 (Jun 19, 2007)

KMTTG


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## shwru980r (Jun 22, 2008)

The original OLED S3 wasn't restricted to a specific external esata drive. I suppose Tivo could send a software update to allow any external drive to be used on the newer models and disavow any and all support for the external drive.


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## Karyn (Jul 19, 2017)

waynomo said:


> Yeah. Swapping out the drive is easy. Buy a larger drive and save yourself some money over the TiVo external drive.


I don't think TiVo made their own anyway.and externals are slow and clumsy (and expensive), IMO.

My TiVo won't be here until Monday or Tuesday and thanks to very snail like customer service from Mohu I won't even be able to set mine up for another week (_they've not even shipped the antennae (2) that I purchased a couple days ago )_.

I was considering upgrading the hard drive right off as at first I thought 1TB was overkill for OTA but now, seeing as I didn't watch TV in a day being so focused on learning TiVo things, that dinky ½ TB of Xfinity's is COMPLETELY full! UNBELIEVABLE! What's even MORE unbelievable is that they actually charge $26 a month to use that piece of dinosaur crap. 

Any brand preferences? I'm all WD now for other things. Used to be Seagate but they've proven most unreliable.


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## waynomo (Nov 9, 2002)

Karyn said:


> I don't think TiVo made their own anyway.and externals are slow and clumsy (and expensive), IMO.
> 
> My TiVo won't be here until Monday or Tuesday and thanks to very snail like customer service from Mohu I won't even be able to set mine up for another week (_they've not even shipped the antennae (2) that I purchased a couple days ago )_.
> 
> ...


There is a thread that discusses drives. Check that out. It's in the appropriate forum. LMK if you can't find it.


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## tim1724 (Jul 3, 2007)

Karyn said:


> Used to be Seagate but they've proven most unreliable.


Seagate's 6TB drives have been very reliable. (I use them extensively at work, albeit the SAS enterprise models, but from what I've seen the low-end SATA version is just as reliable.)

But yeah, they went through a pretty bad stretch there with the 2-3TB drives. So I'd say it depends what size drive you're looking at. If you want an easy drop-in TiVo drive replacement, 3 TB is the max and for that I'd go with WD.


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## Karyn (Jul 19, 2017)

They WERE 2 and 3 TB's! Five (5) in as many months! Just dropped dead and all Seagate rambled on about was that I didn't use their cloud. Yeesh! I got the impression they had a lot of issues with those drives based on the tired sounding voices on the phone. They made trying to send them back a giant P.I.T.A. do I didn't and swore Seagate off forever.

I agree on 3TB being max. I've heard of larger but I think it might be asking for problems. And yes, WD...VERY reliable in all that they do, IMO.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

Karyn said:


> I agree on 3TB being max. I've heard of larger but I think it might be asking for problems. And yes, WD...VERY reliable in all that they do, IMO.


3 TB is max if you do not want to connect to a PC and run MSFR, then its 8TB max.


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## gespears (Aug 10, 2007)

ThAbtO said:


> Run MSFR, then its 8TB max.


Love my 6 TB Red WD drive. No glitches for years. Tons of stuff I don't have time to watch.


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## Karyn (Jul 19, 2017)

gespears said:


> Love my 6 TB Red WD drive. No glitches for years. Tons of stuff I don't have time to watch.


I've never had so much as a hiccup with a WD. Very quiet too.


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## wtkflhn (May 12, 2006)

I thought the drive in the Roamio OTA was small, so I still had a WD TIVO expander. They were made for TIVO by WD. I hooked it up to my OTA, and it's working fine. I hoping it still will after this new software update comes out.


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## sdawson (Aug 18, 2016)

wtkflhn said:


> I thought the drive in the Roamio OTA was small, so I still had a WD TIVO expander. They were made for TIVO by WD. I hooked it up to my OTA, and it's working fine. I hoping it still will after this new software update comes out.


Yeah, I too have a year old Roamio OTA with 1TB internal and 1TB external bought from Tivo directly at the same time I bought that unit. I would expect it to work, otherwise all my shows will be lost.

I added another Roamio OTA this year for a different room in the house, and went wit the suggestion to just ditch the 1TB that comes with it and put in the 3TB. This I did, and it's working fine. I was not aware of this option a year ago, but am thankful to this community for helping me.

At some point, I may replace the internal HD in that original unit, but not this year, unless an updates forces me. I don't run windows, so would have to find someone who does to let me format a larger drive, as I'd likely want to go for >3TB on the orginal unit if doing that replacement.


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