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7200 vs 5400 drives: My results
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Posted by: Brian4.0

I just upgraded my own Tivo to 300 hours. I'm elated with the results, and I wanted to share my thoughts and results especially with regards to what hard drives to use:

Hard Drive Choices

I read many recommendations to upgrade with 5400 rpm drives (cheaper, quieter, cooler). But I also read some complaints about slower menus after upgrading. I also read discussions about adding more memory to alleviate that.

After mulling these things a bit, I wanted to do my own critical thinking before I ordered any hard drives or memory. I wanted to learn how the Tivo uses the hard drive when displaying menus, to know what approach would help the most in keeping them quick. The last thing I wanted after upgrading was slower menus.

So I took the cover off my Tivo in order to listen to the hard drive while paging through my "Now Playing" list and other screens. What I found by playing around for a while was that in general, the Tivo exhibited no head seek noises until I went into a menu, or paged through a list of "Now Playing" programs or "To Do List" programs. The rest of the time, the hard disk was just spinning quietly.

A Theory of Operation Emerges…

This makes perfect sense. The Tivo is almost always either 1) buffering live TV, 2) recording a program, or 3) playing a recorded program. All of those things involve streaming, sequential disk access. It's only when you need a menu displayed that the Tivo operating system has to jump away from the place on disk that it's streaming video to (or from) to go elsewhere to fetch your program listings. Then it jumps back to streaming video in or out again, and once there, it's quiet again (at least, no more head-seek noises).

To test this theory, I went from live TV to the "Now Playing" screen. I heard the head seek, the first page of listings appeared, and the disk drive went quiet again. Just as I expected. Now I went down a page: another head seek noise, a new page of listings appeared, and the drive went quiet again. Down another page: head seek, new info appeared, quiet again. Every time I went to a new page, it required a disk access.

Now I went up a page: no head seek noise! That page was already in RAM, because I had just looked at it--meaning no disk access was required to go get it again. Up another page--sure enough, no head seek noise. I could now go up and down through all four pages of my "Now Playing" list now with no head seeks (meaning no disk access)---all that data was now in memory.

Where This Led Me

What I decided from these experiments is that the hard-drive average access speed is an important contributor to menu display speed for things you haven't looked at recently. So unless you pay somebody to pre-page your current "Now Playing" list into memory before you get home every night, you're going to be waiting on hard-disk accesses to fetch each new page of programs you browse through.

So for my own upgrade hard drives, I decided to go with a couple of WD1200JB (Western Digital 7200rpm 8.9ms 120GB) drives. I am very happy to report that they are subjectively no louder than the original 5400rpm Quantum drive was. They raised the internal temperature on my unit by only 2 degrees C to 35C, and most importantly to me, my menus are every bit as quick after the upgrade as previously.

Another Possible Approach to Consider

I believe that the Tivo only stores program listings on the "A" drive. Just streaming video doesn't require fast access times, and from what I can tell, the Tivo doesn't store anything but video on the "B" drive.

So perhaps the best approach if you want to retain your fast menus but still save some money is to use a fast-access drive like the WD1200JB mentioned above as your "A" drive, and use a slower, more economical drive like the Maxtor as your "B" drive. Or, just add a Maxtor as your "B" drive, and retain your original Quantum "A" drive.

I hope this helps you in your own upgrade! Enjoy!

Posted by: daberning

Thanks for the info! I couldn't find any decent priced 5400 RPM drives locally and went with a WD 7200 RPM disk instead. I've seen all the posts suggesting the 5400 RPM disks run quieter and cooler and thought maybe I made a mistake with my purchase. Your research made me feel better about my impending upgrade.

Posted by: mkizer

I've currently got the original 20GB "A" drive, and a Maxtor 80GB 5400RPM "B" drive. I am going to be replacing the "A" drive with a Maxtor 120GB 7200RPM drive (on sale at Best Buy and coudln't pass it up).

Right now my SA TiVo runs anywhere between 35C and 41C, I'll monitor temp. after the upgrade, as well as menu speed and report back.

Posted by: mrtickle

quote:
Originally posted by Brian4.0
Or, just add a Maxtor as your "B" drive, and retain your original Quantum "A" drive.

That particular idea is ok for adding small B drives, but very risky for big B drives! Strictly speaking you really should never do this if you are adding a 120GB drive as a "B" drive, because it would mean that you can't expand the swap space on the A drive during the upgrade. If you ever got a GSOD you'd have to resort to the emergency repair procedure.

Posted by: dpsjolly

7200rpm drives draw more current than 5400rpm units. What is the PSU rated at? Can it support 2x7200rpm drives?

Posted by: Barry

I keep reading 5400/7200 in regards to noise, heat, performance, and which makes more blue smoke when they go bad.

So

WD1200AB 120Gig 5400rpm 2MB 506Mbits/s Read/Write/Idle 6.25W Seek 10.5W Idle 34dBA Seek Mode0 37dBA Seek Mode3 34dBA
WD1200BB 120Gig 7200rpm 2MB 736Mbits/s Read/Write/Idle 7.75W Seek 12.0W Idle 34dBA Seek Mode0 37dBA Seek Mode3 35dBA
WD1200JB 120Gig 7200rpm 8MB 738Mbits/s Read/Write/Idle 7.75W Seek 12.0W Idle 34dBA Seek Mode0 36dBA Seek Mode3 35dBA

Seek times across all three were the same. Power consumption is about the same, and noise difference is not worth a mention.

So...............the deciding technical factor seems to be either
1. What you can get cheapest.
or
2. The WD1200JB's three year warrenty (the others have only one yr).

Barry

http://www.westerndigital.com/produ...?Model=WD1200AB
http://www.westerndigital.com/produ...?Model=WD1200BB
http://www.westerndigital.com/produ...?Model=WD1200JB

Posted by: vman41

quote:
Originally posted by Brian4.0
The Tivo is almost always either 1) buffering live TV, 2) recording a program, or 3) playing a recorded program. All of those things involve streaming, sequential disk access. It's only when you need a menu displayed that the Tivo operating system has to jump away from the place on disk that it's streaming video to (or from) to go elsewhere to fetch your program listings. Then it jumps back to streaming video in or out again, and once there, it's quiet again (at least, no more head-seek noises).

When you are playing a recorded program, the TiVo is still recording what is coming in on the tuner (either to the live buffer or another saved program). So it's not only when in the menu screens that the head will be thrashing back and forth. I put a stethoscope on top of my TiVo and can definitely hear the the head seeks while playing a recorded program.

Posted by: Imageek2

quote:
Originally posted by Barry
I 2. The WD1200JB's three year warrenty (the others have only one yr).

Hmm. I just bought a WD1200BB from Fry's which according to the ad had a 3 year warranty. It's even printed on the receipt. Anybody know anything about this?

Posted by: Barry

The big 3 disk manu's reduced there warrenty periods to one year as of Oct 1st 2002. WD kept the 3yr warrenty on the special edition. You may have lucked out with slightly older stock.

Here is the WD policy but please remember it's not the only one to adopt this policy, they just were a little more upfront about it and didn't hide so deep in the website.

http://support.wdc.com/warranty/newpolicy.asp

Barry

Posted by: lart2150

Barry: the through put on the drives does not matter for the tivo it's the seek time. look at this for more info http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...&threadid=76959 . and their will not be a big diffrence with the faster drive. with the caching ide device it should speed things up a lot!

Posted by: Barry

I did not intend to recommend a drive based on throughput. The seek times across all 3 were the same. Like I said in the post, it appears to me that there are only two reasons to pick one above the other, availability/cost or warrenty. Although maybe a different manu can provide a better spec on power or noise, making it worth buying.

Barry