TiVo Community Forums Archives - 344h 41 min SA TiVo

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

344h 41 min SA TiVo
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: GBaz

I went to PTVUpgrade and saywthe they are selling a 344h 41m TiVo Upgrade .
I remember reading this thread http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...&threadid=41637 in which tivoupgrade state:

"I 'tweaked' the swap space down. Purely for benchmarking purposes; I wouldn't recommend this for an actual running unit, though..."

Then why would you sell the upgrade with out the same disclaimer?

Posted by: embeem

money?

I certainly hope they intend on providing warranty and support options so we don't get a flood of people on AVS wondering why their newly upgraded TiVo has issues (we have enough of those people already)

Posted by: HTH

An easier way to inflate capacity would be to tweak down the bitrate of Basic Quality, and wouldn't have problems like swap reduction or elimination of alternate root and kernel partitions (which would make upgrades impossible).

Posted by: GBaz

quote:
Originally posted by HTH
An easier way to inflate capacity would be to tweak down the bitrate of Basic Quality, and wouldn't have problems like swap reduction or elimination of alternate root and kernel partitions (which would make upgrades impossible).

Would TiVo recalculate and display the recording times based on the setting of the bitrate (in the set default record quality screen)?

Posted by: bsnelson

Yes, considering this is what TiVo themselves did to basic somewhere in the 2.0x lineage to get the 14 hour units back up to 14 hours.

Brad

Posted by: tivoupgrade

quote:
Originally posted by GBaz
I went to PTVUpgrade and saywthe they are selling a 344h 41m TiVo Upgrade .
I remember reading this thread http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...&threadid=41637 in which tivoupgrade state:

"I 'tweaked' the swap space down. Purely for benchmarking purposes; I wouldn't recommend this for an actual running unit, though..."

Then why would you sell the upgrade with out the same disclaimer?

Didn't see this until now. We are NOT selling the 344 hr 41 min upgrade. The upgrade we sell is 344 hours and 30 minutes. As I stated when taking the TiVo crown - we reduced the swap space for benchmarking purposes; we do not sell the configuration used for that benchmark.

Also note, all of our kits are fully warranteed and supported; we've never had any complaints about performance.

Lou

Posted by: Otto

Lou, I have a question: I thought the 344 hr upgrade was running 2 160 meg drives, insofar as the Tivo would acknowlegde a 160 gig drive upgrade, but yet not be able to access anything beyond 128 gig (LBA limitation). Has this been tested to full capacity? Does 344 hr actually work all the way?

I mean, I can change the index partition to make the thing think it has 3000 hrs, but that doesn't mean it'll really work..

Posted by: tivoupgrade

Hi Otto -

Yes, the 344 hour is 2x160GB drives; (as is the 259 hour for DirecTiVo units). It has been tested fully; and works fine (we've got about 100 customers with this configuration in both standalone and directivo units and have been selling these for at least 3 or 4 months now; longer? so i consider it to be fully field-tested, as well).

In any case, the reason there are no 'fundamental' issues is that the reported capacities already reflect the limitation of the ATA/33 controller; ie everything above 137GB is essentially thrown away, since its a function of the controller that the full 160GB on each drive cannot be addressed.

Another way of looking at it as that 23 or so GB is 'wasted' per drive... The TiVo doesn't really acknowlege the drive as anything bigger, just as a PC without an ATA/133 controller will just see the drive as a smaller one, too...

Cheers,
Lou

Posted by: cramer

quote:
Originally posted by tivoupgrade
In any case, the reason there are no 'fundamental' issues is that the reported capacities already reflect the limitation of the ATA/33 controller; ie everything above 137GB is essentially thrown away, since its a function of the controller that the full 160GB on each drive cannot be addressed.

This has nothing to do with the "controller". The limitation is 100% in the kernel (read: software) that does not use lba48 to address beyond 128G (2^28 sectors.) Adding lba48 to the tivo kernel is a non-trivial task that would make your tivo 100% non-upgradable. (if at all functional)

If you have a drive that supports 1024 byte sectors (and I know of no IDE drive that does), the limit would be 256G.

Posted by: tivoupgrade

Once you get past the controller limitations, you are then limited by the kernel limitations. See http://www.maxtor.com/products/bigdrive/whitepaper.htm for more details... Unless I am misinterpreting here, its still fundamental to the controller's implementation - hence any 'hack' to the kernel would have no effect, as the ATA/33 spec is limited by a 28-bit addressing specification.

Sort of off-topic, though - the issue is that the TiVo, whether it be hardware / firmware / or software/kernel issues only address 137GB of each 160GB drive; hence the 344 hour 30 min 'kit size' -- the reported capacity is fully address as the limitation is already taken into account.

Lou