TiVo Community Forums Archives - Suggestions and hard disk life

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Suggestions and hard disk life
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Posted by: sandiegorob

It appears as if the hard disk in some HR10-250s are short lived. Mine is working fine so far but the unit seems intent on almost continual recording of TIVO suggested material. This doesn't bother me but leads me to ask if this could shorten the units useful life. Will I extend its life by shutting off suggestions?

Posted by: unixadm

Suggestions won't make a difference.

Remember.....TiVo is bufferering BOTH tuners ALL THE TIME....so it is always recording two streams on the hard drive at all times.

When a suggestion is recording, it is recording that stream as a suggestion rather than leaving it in buffer.

Just like any TiVo of the past, there will be some hard drive failures. In this case, they are using 250GB drives that are relatively new on the market, so there may a slightly higher percentage of failures. The 250's have been on the market long enough now, that it is more leading edge and less bleeding edge, so it will even out over time.

Posted by: dlhenderson

Having just had my hard drive die i'd also be interested in knowing if a ups might help out should i receive any power outages or surges in the future. (i'm waiting for my replacement and want it to be happy.) I've also found that all 3 lnb's on my satellite are now dead, i assume something crazy electrical happened, zapped my satellite and must have gone through and killed my hard drive.

Posted by: Chris Gerhard

quote:
Originally posted by dlhenderson
Having just had my hard drive die i'd also be interested in knowing if a ups might help out should i receive any power outages or surges in the future. (i'm waiting for my replacement and want it to be happy.) I've also found that all 3 lnb's on my satellite are now dead, i assume something crazy electrical happened, zapped my satellite and must have gone through and killed my hard drive.

Yes a UPS is a must for a TiVo in my opinion. Whether or not it would have helped for that hit you must have taken, I don't know.

Chris

Posted by: GoodSpike

One reason a UPS is a must for a Tivo, is without one, after a 5 second power outtage you have to go through a rather long reboot.

Posted by: Scaroth

quote:
Originally posted by unixadm

Remember.....TiVo is buffering BOTH tuners ALL THE TIME....so it is always recording two streams on the hard drive at all times.

Doesn't it stop recording the buffers when you put the unit in standby? And if you have suggestions turned off, it won't be constantly recording. Of course, the disk will be spinning...

Posted by: jor-el

quote:
Originally posted by sandiegorob
It appears as if the hard disk in some HR10-250s are short lived. Mine is working fine so far but the unit seems intent on almost continual recording of TIVO suggested material. This doesn't bother me but leads me to ask if this could shorten the units useful life. Will I extend its life by shutting off suggestions?

These aren't short lived drives, these are defectives. Figure on the typical 5 year service life once they get past the infant mortality stage.

Putting a UPS in front will greatly reduce the jarring mini outages where the power isn't out long enough for the drives to spin down. But with the price of a replacement drive now less than 20% of the unit cost, seems best to have a backup. Is it possible to use a generic image someone else generates, or must we open up our boxes individually to set up our own image?

Posted by: Chris Gerhard

quote:
Originally posted by jor-el
These aren't short lived drives, these are defectives. Figure on the typical 5 year service life once they get past the infant mortality stage.

Putting a UPS in front will greatly reduce the jarring mini outages where the power isn't out long enough for the drives to spin down. But with the price of a replacement drive now less than 20% of the unit cost, seems best to have a backup. Is it possible to use a generic image someone else generates, or must we open up our boxes individually to set up our own image?

A generic image is fine, you will just have to do a clear and delete once for the initial setup.

Chris

Posted by: cashmoneymac

A high quality UPS for the Tivo may be a good option. A more important and essential item is adequate surge protection for ALL devices and feeds into TIVO and also your entire system (since its connected to the TIVO). Simply putting surge protection on a few power input lines for main components is not adequate especially if you have a nearby lightening strike. btw - if you have a direct lightening strike on your house - most likely none of this matters - but that is a relatively rare occurrence.

Be sure to include surge protection for all incoming cable, satellite, and antenna feeds and also telephone cord feeds into the Tivo. Basically any electrical device or feed that ultimately is directly or indirectly connected to your tivo or any other component should have good quality surge protection. Note that a lightning strike can come in via any physical connection - power, cable, antenna, phone wire, interconnects, hdmi, speaker wire, component cables, etc, etc.

Posted by: terryg

I use a Monster Cable power conditioner for all my A/V equipment, including the TiVos. It's not a UPS, but it works fine for my needs.
The only thing that does not run through it is the sat feeds, and that
is because:
1. I have too many (4) to fit through two supressors
2. I didn't like the signal degradation it incurred

I have considered stand-alone supressors that fit over the outside grounding blocks:

http://www.hyperlinktech.com/web/hgln_f.php

I am curious to know if anyone has tried them; how does the 0.5 db loss from these mean to the overall signal strength (the one measured from 0 to 100)?

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