TiVo Community Forums Archives - Upgrading w/Larger Drives Slow Down Tivo?

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Upgrading w/Larger Drives Slow Down Tivo?
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Posted by: Larus

One of my TiVos is a single drive Phillips DirecTivo with the stock 35 hour drive. I'm starting to experience periodic "screen freezes" and occasionally it will require a reboot to operate properly. I'm thinking the hard drive is starting to fail. I'd like to add an 80 gig drive I already have plus a 120 gig, making it a 2 drive TiVo, but I 'm concerned those larger drives will slow my TiVo way down-is that legitimate concern?

Posted by: Robert S

It may slow down a bit.

Presumably you want to keep your recordings?

You'll need to use dd to clone the A drive onto the replacement and then mfsadd to expand to fill the extra space. (You don't have to fill the extra space, of course - 40Gb drives are very cheap, although make sure your new 40Gb isn't smaller than your old 40Gb!)

200Gb is over the limit beyond which a TiVo can recover from a green screen filesystem corruption error without extra swap. See the Fixes thread for a couple of ways to address this issue.

If you don't mind losing your recordings, use MFS Tools 2.0 to make your 120Gb drive your A drive and (if desired) add a big B drive and your TiVo will be noticably faster than it is now, and have enough swap to be safe at 200Gb.

Use MFS Tools 2.0 as described in New Hinsdale.

Posted by: Tiger

Is there a problem with using MFS Tools to copy the old drive to the new drive and enlarging the swap at the same time? (Problems with overly large swap aside)

Posted by: Robert S

He's got a 35+120 configuration - too large to go on a single target drive.

What are you suggesting he do?

<edit>No he doesn't! Well done Tiger, your reading skils are better than mine.

Yes, just do an MFS Tools pipe transfer from the A drive to the two target drives and you'll be fine.

Using -s 127 will expand your swap so you'll be quite safe in the new configuration.</edit>

Posted by: Larus

"If you don't mind losing your recordings, use MFS Tools 2.0 to make your 120Gb drive your A drive and (if desired) add a big B drive and your TiVo will be noticably faster than it is now, and have enough swap to be safe at 200Gb."

This sounds like what I need to do. I am not concerned about keeping my recordings and definetely want a faster TiVo. I don't want to keep my current 40 gig drive (as it's failing, apparently) and I do want to add an 80 gig and a 120 gig drive. Does it matter which is made the "A" drive? Do I need to worry about swap file size in this scenario? Thanks!

Posted by: mrtickle

You definitely need to increase swap file size yes.

You can use either of those two as your A drive (but that's only because they are both bigger than the original 40GB drive). To increase the swap space you need a new bigger A drive than the originl.

HTH

Posted by: Robert S

Looks like my posts are helpful even when I don't answer the question asked! :)

If you use New Hinsdale, the MFS Tools commands have the right options to increase the amount of swap.

You /may/ be able to salvage your recordings from the 40Gb drive if the TiVo still boots from it, but it's much quicker just to copy the Guide data.