TiVo Community Forums Archives - Stuttering Tivo, happy again.

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Stuttering Tivo, happy again.
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Posted by: talex

Ladies and Gents, thanks to you folks, and especially Tiger's MFS toolkit I was able to upgrade my Phillips SA to a 120gig Wester Digital Caviar. The process was surprisingly painless thanks to all the help buried in these pages. Next step will be airnet, once I get my access point in place.

As an aside, my original drive was having the stuttering issues that some folks here have reported, and is frankly why I went with the larger cache on the Cavier drives. My pet theory is that even if it's a drive problem, the larger buffer should give you some leeway in the streaming. I was wondering if anyone using one of the larger cache drive sizes (8MB) has seen the stuttering issue? Anyhow, thanks again folks for all the help.

-Timothy

Posted by: weaknees

Glad to hear the upgrade went OK, but the stuttering issue isn't really a cache issue at all. It means your original drive was failing.

Cache doesn't really help a great deal with TiVos because you use constantly new data. Cache is good for repetitive reads, like using a spreadsheet or reading email. But since the TiVo really pumps a huge amount of data through, 8 MB of cache might only be usable in some menus, and maybe for an instant replay.

Michael

Posted by: talex

That surprises me a bit, I mean, presumably the stream could be read ahead into cache right? I mean it's not going to be useful as repeat data hits because of the nature of the Tivo, but it would still effectively act as a buffer space.

-Timothy

Posted by: mrtickle

You forget that tivo is permanently switching between
1. playing back a recording/live buffer/menu background
2. making a new recording/live buffer
...many times a second

Posted by: talex

Ugh, you're right, I did forget about that. How do drives split reads versus rights on the onboard cache? Do they even set anything aside at all, or is in first come first served?

-Timothy