TiVo Community Forums Archives - Has anyone used the Maxtor DiamondMax® D540X 160GB drives

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Has anyone used the Maxtor DiamondMax® D540X 160GB drives
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Posted by: puppypuppy

I'm planning on upgrading my Single drive Phillips DTIVO and was considering a 160GB Maxtor D540X. Has anyone used these drives? If so any problem or things I need to think about? I also have a friend that has a 2 Drive Phillips unit and issues there?

TIA for any info.

Posted by: deebo

I upgrade a Tivo using 2 of these drives and did not have any problems. Just follow the hinsdale how to and everything should go smoothly.

Posted by: tmtech

Has anyone used the search function on this board????

Posted by: deebo

lol :)

Posted by: KFL

The 5400 rpm 160 GB disks work fine. Be sure to create them on the older style controller that will only recognize 128 GB (around 137 Gb using new math). I have 2 of them in a DSR6K.

Posted by: wysiwig3

Puppypuppy,

You need to realize the the TiVo's IDE controller only recognizes up to 128GB. While the new higher capacity Maxtors will work in the TiVo, you will only be able to use 128GB of the 160GB capacity.

The reason Maxtor is shipping new IDE controllers with large capacity retail drives is because the majority of the systems on the market do not have the capability of addressing the full space of these large drives.

Posted by: puppypuppy

quote:
Originally posted by tmtech
Has anyone used the search function on this board????

I did use the search but ...

a) I did not see where anyone had done it with a DTIVO (but I could have missed it).
b) There seemed to be some confusion about what would really happen from a capacity/storage perspective and
c) The one interesting piece of data that was *not* listed anywhere that I could find other than this thread is that if you have a computer that can actually address the entire 160 MB (and mine can) you *might* have some problems.

But ... if people want to slam me for asking a question that has "already been answered" then go ahead .... but I think this kind of summary is ocasionally good.

Posted by: jfdulles

Are the D540x series of drives all based on Quantum firmware? My 80Gs seem to be, just wondering about the bigger ones?

Posted by: wysiwig3

quote:
c) The one interesting piece of data that was *not* listed anywhere that I could find other than this thread is that if you have a computer that can actually address the entire 160 MB (and mine can) you *might* have some problems.

The reason you'll probably have problems with this scenario is this: If you computer can address the entire 160GB of space on the new drive, then when you run the tools to create the proper TiVo partitions they will use all of that space. However, when you move that drive back to the TiVo (which can only address the first 128GB), then portions of the required layout of the disk (everything between the 129GB mark to 160GB point) will be inaccessable to the TiVo.

This is why you need to prep the large disks using a controller that matches the address capabilities of the TiVo itself.

Posted by: HTH

quote:
Originally posted by wysiwig3
The reason you'll probably have problems with this scenario is this: If you computer can address the entire 160GB of space on the new drive, then when you run the tools to create the proper TiVo partitions they will use all of that space. However, when you move that drive back to the TiVo (which can only address the first 128GB), then portions of the required layout of the disk (everything between the 129GB mark to 160GB point) will be inaccessable to the TiVo.

It helps if the proper abbreviations are used. It is a 160 GB (metric measure, 1 G == 10^9) drive, but the limit is 128 GiB (binary measure, 1 Gi == 2^30). The (512 B) blocks numbered from 0 to (2^38)-1. Blocks 2^38 and higher are inaccessible to the TiVo, though it will try and fail. (That's bytes from 0 to the 128 Gi-1 mark accessible, 128 Gi mark on up inaccessible.)

People have tried to use these drives to their full capacity, but they would quickly fail once the TiVo tried to address the space outside its addressable range. This forced a distinction to be made for TiVo King, conditioned on the resulting TiVo being functional (otherwise one could put a carefully invalid partition table on a couple small drives, bless them, and get TiVo to calculate an insanely large capacity, so many hours that it wouldn't have room to report the minutes).