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My experience upgrading with Weaknees
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Posted by: rodneyremington

I've had my series 2 stand-alone 40 hour about a month and couldn't take it any longer, I needed more space!

So I ordered the weeknees 120 MB 2nd drive upgrade with the cooling package.

Arrived at my door in 24 hours, despite my opting for free ground shipping. Nice.

Packaging was excellent. Instructions were very thorough ( but not perfect and not exactly specific to my machine which surprised me) and required minimal technical skills. A total computer newbie would sweat a little, but anyone with basic mechanical skills who isn't scared of getting their hands into the guts of a machine could do it. My kit was missing 4 screws so I had to jerry-rig a little bit with my own screws holding the secondary fan down.

My initial impressions: piece of cake. The TiVo is NOISER than it used to be, I suspect because there are 2 fans instead of one now and 2 hardrives spinning. Nice to see the 180+ hours indicated in the menu!

I would recommend them, 40 or even 80 hr TiVos are too limited to me utilized to their potential; I just don't understand why TiVo doesn't start offering 100, 200 or even larger hr TiVos from the factory. Why would I want to record at basic quality to watch on a $10,000 home theater system just so I don't run out of space on a $70 hard drive?

Posted by: tivoupgrade

quote:
Originally posted by rodneyremington
I just don't understand why TiVo doesn't start offering 100, 200 or even larger hr TiVos from the factory. Why would I want to record at basic quality to watch on a $10,000 home theater system just so I don't run out of space on a $70 hard drive?

TiVo makes its money on the subscriptions, not the hardware; so its really their objective to provide lower cost/ lower price systems which will sell in higher volume. High-end, high-priced systems tend to sell in lower volumes, and they don't make much, if anything, on each box sold.

So, there really isn't a lot of upside for them to provide higher capacity boxes, and there is little market pressure to do so. Fortunately, there are several legitimate alternatives for those who do want to upgrade, so you can have your cake and eat it too!

Posted by: ThreeSoFar

I'd recommend AGAINST such a pre-fab upgrade if you've ever added a hard drive to a PC before. It's only a bit more complex than that, really.

Posted by: GREEK

I would ask why anyone would bother to keep a 40 gig drive in the unit at all, and spend 50 bucks on a bracket? 2 drives equal more heat, more noise, more stress on the power supply, and such little extra record time. keep your stock drives as safety backups when the new drives fail (they will) and go with 1 large drive, 120 or 160 gig.

Posted by: uclakidd

quote:
Originally posted by GREEK
I would ask why anyone would bother to keep a 40 gig drive in the unit at all, and spend 50 bucks on a bracket? 2 drives equal more heat, more noise, more stress on the power supply, and such little extra record time. keep your stock drives as safety backups when the new drives fail (they will) and go with 1 large drive, 120 or 160 gig.

i don't think the extra record time is so 'little'--it's pretty relative. i had a 120gb in there for a few weeks and as i got used to extra space, i kept wanting it to get bigger. 140 hours wasn't cutting it for me. so i popped in another 120gb hd and got the the bracket from weakness. the bracket is awesome, makes the inside looks stock. the extra fan DROPPED the temp inside by 3 degrees and now i have a total of 284 hours constantly running at 30C. so i think it's good to go with 2 drives for those who like to have a lot of recordings at a certain quality.

Posted by: Crash331

quote:
Originally posted by GREEK
I would ask why anyone would bother to keep a 40 gig drive in the unit at all, and spend 50 bucks on a bracket? 2 drives equal more heat, more noise, more stress on the power supply, and such little extra record time. keep your stock drives as safety backups when the new drives fail (they will) and go with 1 large drive, 120 or 160 gig.

More heat, more noise, more stress is hardly noticeable. 165 hours of record time is largely noticeable.

And did a hard drive beat you when you were a kid? Have a little more faith in them. It's not like they are programmed to die in a year or something. I have many old HDDs I use in old systems and they are doing fine.

Posted by: ThreeSoFar

I agree on the 40G drives not being worth the effort/expense of the bracket. Sure, if the 140 or 150 hours form the 120/160G drive alone is not enough for you, put in two of those, but leave out the 40.

And drives do die. It's only a matter of time, which can be anywhere from months to years. And once you pass the months stage, it is most likely going to be years, but it will die.

Thankfully, all of my TiVos made it to years and never had a drive die yet.

Posted by: Tkilmer

Well my experience adding a hard drive did not last long. 3 months and TiVo would no longer boot. Plus performance was noticably worse with two drives in my DTivo.

What interesting is that neither drive turned out to be bad, they just did not work well together. So I now have the 120 gig in my TiVo by itself and I am going to use the 40 gig as a backup drive.

Oh...and I would highly recommend Weaknees for anyone not wanting to do it themselves. They make it very easy. I now can do it myself since I decided I wanted backups because of my problems, but Weaknees is a nice option.

Posted by: skanter

quote:
Originally posted by GREEK
I would ask why anyone would bother to keep a 40 gig drive in the unit at all, and spend 50 bucks on a bracket? 2 drives equal more heat, more noise, more stress on the power supply, and such little extra record time. keep your stock drives as safety backups when the new drives fail (they will) and go with 1 large drive, 120 or 160 gig.

I added a Weeknees 120G to my 80G SA, and now have 225 hrs.
The Weeknees system, contrary to your statement, resulted in a -cooler- and -quieter- system. It has to do with the design of their bracket and quieter replacement fans.

They also include a small component that staggers the power when booting the drives, putting no extra stress on the power supply.

Posted by: weaknees

quote:
2 drives equal more heat, more noise, more stress on the power supply, and such little extra record time. keep your stock drives as safety backups when the new drives fail (they will) and go with 1 large drive, 120 or 160 gig.

We generally agree with the "replace" vs "add" assessment. However, please note that the heat/noise issue is as much a function of drive choice as the number of drives. In our experience, using two drives is often much less noisy and produces much less heat than, say, a single 7200 RPM drive of certain manufacturers.

Not everything is as black-and-white as you seem to imply. As Skanter notes, we have had significant success reducing heat in two-drive units by adding a second cooling fan inside the unit. Further, many model TiVos were designed to accommodate two drives.

We respect your opinion, but have to vehemently disagree that replacing with one drive is the only viable (or intelligent) upgrade path.

Michael

Posted by: rodneyremington

I would echo the sentiment that choice of hard drives has as much to do with noise as whether you have 2 or 1. I also see no increase in internal temperature with my upgrade, likely due to 2nd fan. As mentioned, it is noisier but only when particular attention is paid to the white noise created by the unit, for example my wife has not noticed or commented on it at all.

Many people, myself included, find adding a drive technically easier than replacing the factory drive, with these aftermarket kits, because you do not need programming or other more technical skills. I am fairly tech. savvy but have no interest in the time or effort required to learn to replace the factory drive as easy as it may seem to some.

Frankly the money for the bracket is hardly worth mentioning, compared to anything that can save me time and effort. If you consider your time worth less than $30 per hour you may feel otherwise. Check out the number of posts in this forum asking for help fixing a screwed up home-job hard drive swap. That would be me, no doubt. As an analogy, I am perfectly capable of changing the oil in my vehicles myself, but it is not worth the hassle and time to do it when there are others willing to do it for me while I play with my kids :) Check out this link that was posted today as an example of the increased difficulty of swapping the factory HD:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...threadid=156807

I'm not saying it's extremely difficult to do, just more difficult.

Also, this "little" amount of extra time added by keeping the factory drive is actually enough recording time to satisfy 95% of all TiVo users. So I guess recording time is all relative.

The nice thing is that we have options, those that hate to pay anyone to do anything can do it themselves, and people like me who will gladly pay for a service that makes my life easier can go through weaknees.