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Tivo harddrive constantly spinning?
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Posted by: yuk m0wf

All, today I upgraded to the Pioneer 810H Tivo unit. I'm fairly happy with the service and unit, especially since my Series1 Sony Tivo is on the fritz.

One question I do have, is that I noticed the harddrive seems to be constantly spinning. I suspect the drive was always active on my series one, however, I didn't necessarily hear it writing. This unit sounds like the drive is constantly writing data to disk. It's not damangingly noisy, but I did happen to notice it. Keep in mind this is within the first 8-10 hours of owning the unit and getting it setup with Tivo plus, etc, etc.

Should I be concerned? Or is this unit simply going to be vocal about the fact its writing to disc?

yuk m0wf
Pioneer DVR-810H

Posted by: stevel

The drive is always spinning and your TiVo is always recording something - the live buffer if nothing else. (Exception: DirecTV-TiVos in Standby don't record the buffer, but the disk still spins.)

Drives seem to vary in noisinessl You're hearing seek noise. Some people find that running the drive manufacturer's acoustic management utility on the disk (requires that you remove the disk and temporarily attach it to a PC) can help in certain cases.

Posted by: rsnaider

Steve is correct and I can personally tell you that the Western Digitals (7,200 RPM 8Meg cache) in my TiVo box are much loader then the Seagates (7,200 RPM 2Meg cache) used in my Sony box.

Seagate are know for some of the quitest drives while Western Digital's are great performers, but can be noisy. What I can tell you is that a brand new Western Digital 250 GB I just installed in my PC is very quite compared to the 120's used about a year and half ago for my upgrade.

Posted by: mtnbkr1

But - to balance the discussion - My DirecTivo is virtually silent compared to my Panasonic HD Tuner that sits right next to it. (The Panny doesn't have a hard drive, but has one of loudest fans I have ever heard. I routinely shut this unit off if I am not using it.

Posted by: Want1394

Wait a couple of days and then judge the drive noise. For the first few days, it's building indexes of all the guide data, and all the info for wishlists, season passes, keyword searches, etc. That will be reduced to an hour or so per day later on. Calms down the noise a lot IMO.

Posted by: lkeller729

TIVO just replaced my TIVO (Original one got spiked) and the new one is really noisy. It's a TIVO by the way. I'm going to give a week or so and then complain if I have to. The dog loves it however, and it keeps him entertained more than the TV.