TiVo Community Forums Archives - Capacity expected from 2 120GB drives?

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Capacity expected from 2 120GB drives?
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Posted by: scantor

Last weekend I took the plunge and added a couple of cheap Samsung 120 GB drives to my Tivo, which was a 30 hour unit, with a pair of 13.6GB drives.

I followed the Hinsdale guide, and since I had the controller capacity, just did a direct transfer of the old drives to the new ones, but used mfstools to do it, so that I could expand the swap in case it caused trouble.

This all worked like a charm, and my Tivo came up fine, but based on what others have said, I think I'm not using my full capacity, though the guide seemed to indicate I should be. I'm only getting about 57 hours at best quality, and others have reported 80+ with even less storage.

Is there something else I can do to check this out, or to extend the use of the drives? I know for a fact that it must be using both drives, based on the numbers, but clearly not all of both.

I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that I preserved my recordings with the upgrade. Maybe it's not using the A drive fully, and I'm only getting 13.6 + 120 instead of 120+120?

-- Scott

Posted by: dmerideth

I put a pair of Maxtor 120G drives in my Sony Series 1, and it increased my capacity by 10x.

I went from 9 hrs (best) / 30 hrs to 90 and 300.

I'm pretty sure I followed the same guides (Hinsdale how-to) as you did.

Best of luck to you.

-D.

Posted by: ttb

with 2 80 i get 53 hr and 196

Posted by: dskaufman

I did it with two IBM 120's and it says I have 308 hours of space at lowest quality.

Posted by: scantor

quote:
Originally posted by dmerideth
I put a pair of Maxtor 120G drives in my Sony Series 1, and it increased my capacity by 10x.

I went from 9 hrs (best) / 30 hrs to 90 and 300.

I'm pretty sure I followed the same guides (Hinsdale how-to) as you did.

Best of luck to you.

-D.

Thanks, that at least confirms it. Do you happen to recall specifically what procedure you followed?

I ran a backup, just for safety, but then I just hooked both the Tivo drives to one controller and my new ones to the other, and ran the mfstools backup piped into the restore command with the -s option and both A and B drive parameters.

I have Linux on a SCSI drive, so I was able to boot directly after detaching my normal IDE stuff.

I think what must be happening is that only one of the drives expanded across the whole drive. The other must be stuck at 13.6G

-- Scott

Posted by: Continuum37

Yout theory sounds about right that only 1 drive got expanded. Have you tried using MFS Tools 2.0 to expand the MFS again? Maybe it can expand the other drive. I don't know exactly what commands and tools you used, so maybe if you posted the relevant commands from Hinsdale that you used, someone here could tell you what went wrong.

Posted by: scantor

quote:
Originally posted by Continuum37
Yout theory sounds about right that only 1 drive got expanded. Have you tried using MFS Tools 2.0 to expand the MFS again? Maybe it can expand the other drive. I don't know exactly what commands and tools you used, so maybe if you posted the relevant commands from Hinsdale that you used, someone here could tell you what went wrong.

I ran the command listed in:
UPGRADE CONFIGURATION #5:
From: Any Dual Drive TiVo
To: New A and New B Drive (replacing both drives)

mfstools backup -Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb |
mfstools restore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd

So whatever my problem is, maybe I'm the only one who's encountered it. Note that my BIOS found the new drives and their capacities, so that's not it.

Any clues appreciated. I think my next step is to get my shows watched so I can re-run the upgrade using my backup, but without a full copy preserving the old recordings.

-- Scott