TiVo Community Forums Archives - HDVR2, 9th tee HD bracket, IDE cable, blue connector

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HDVR2, 9th tee HD bracket, IDE cable, blue connector
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Posted by: Darin

First off, if I've missed some new data on this, I apologize...

Last I knew, the placement of an additionaly HD in an HDVR2 using the 9th tee bracket prevents you from using a stock ATA66 cable "properly". It has to be reversed (black connector on the MB, blue on the HD), which prevents ATA66 operation. Has anyone been able to confirm yet if there is is any effect on HD operation in this scenario? Do we know yet if the IDE controllers use ATA66 (or higher)?

I'm going to be helping someone do a HD upgrade soon, and this issue has me just a little nervous. It seems to me that if you carefully removed the center connector, it could fairly easily be moved to another part of the cable & re-crimped. Is that feasible, or even more dangerous than using the cable backwards? What exactly makes the "blue connector" different anyway... is it the only connector that has the traces to port ground to the alternating conductors? Is there a short in two of the pins to tell the MB that it has an ATA66 cable? And how are the gray (secondary) and black (primary) connectors different? Shorts again?

I haven't looked inside of an HDVR2 yet, but based on the following picture, it looks like the best configuration would be for the CENTER connector to be attached to the MB:

http://www.9thtee.com/images/tivobkt2-11.jpg

I'm not even sure if that's a SA unit or an HDVR2, and it's really hard to tell from that pic. From what I understand, theoretically an ATA66 cable should be no less than 10" (due to timing issues with reflections, or something like that), but no more than 18" (to reduce interference and signal loss). So (assuming a custom cable, home built or otherwise) would a cable with the blue connector in the middle be feasible & preferable?

Or is all this a non-issue?

Posted by: Darin

Just a little bump. Anyone know anything about making IDE cables?

Posted by: lifetap

Lets try this again.. Last post timed out when submitting.

While I can't help you with making a cable, you may want to try one of those round ata-66/100 cables. I have seen them come in 12", 18", and 24" lengths, which have all worked in my PCs. With the ones I have, the connectors are a little more spaced out then a standard IDE cable and they are more flexable. Locally I have seen the cables as low as $8 so that may be worth looking into before you try to make a cable.

Posted by: edrock200

Darin,
I don't really have an answer to your question but I upgraded my HDVR2 to 2 drives using a standard IDE cable (ata-66 I believe.) I did have to put it on backwards, and I even had to melt a pin hole on the connector that attaches to the motherboard as one of the pins was blocked. (Both hard drives were missing this pin, only the motherboard had it, so I don't think it's needed.)

Regardless, I've had my HDVR2 running like this for about a week now and it's recording movies ALL DAY. I've watched at least 10 hours of recorded material on it, some of which has to be over on the second drive with no problems.

*edit* Also, I don't know if these drives run in ATA-66 mode...considering the extremely low bandwith needed I doubt it needs full performance. Even if the cable garbled some data there should be plenty of time for error correction to go back an fix before you even notice...but that's just a guess.

Posted by: weaknees

Just to add our experiences: we routinely have people reverse the standard cable to use the blue end for the Master drive, the middle connector for the Slave drive, and the final end for the motherboard. When you do this, you obviously lose the ability to jump your drives as cable select, but that's no big deal.

We looked into getting custom-sized cables, but then we did a lot of testing with these and found that just the reversal does the trick.

FYI - you need to use either a long or a reversed cable on most units with two drives, especially the ones that only come with the short, two-positions cables: both Hughes units, all Series 2 Standalone units (TiVo, AT&T and Sony) and all newer SAT-T60s.

Michael

Posted by: Darin

Thanks for the replies! I'll just reverse a cable then (I've got plenty around, even ata66 cables with all the holes in all the connectors). If anyone discoveres there is an issue, I can always go back & change out the cable. :)

Posted by: Keven

Michael,

FYI - I'm not sure why ... but when I tried reversing one of the 80 pin (ATA 100?) cables the TiVo would not boot. It just stayed at the inital screen - which I believe says something like "Powering Up."

I found I had an old 40 pin (ATA 66?) cable that was relatively long and that seems to work. The drives I installed are newer WD 7200 RPM which I assume could run at ATA 100, but I suppose the TiVo hardware/software doesn't support that anyway, i.e., I assume there should not be any problem using the 40 pin cable with the 7200 rpm drives?

Keven

quote:
Originally posted by weaknees
Just to add our experiences: we routinely have people reverse the standard cable to use the blue end for the Master drive, the middle connector for the Slave drive, and the final end for the motherboard. When you do this, you obviously lose the ability to jump your drives as cable select, but that's no big deal.

We looked into getting custom-sized cables, but then we did a lot of testing with these and found that just the reversal does the trick.

FYI - you need to use either a long or a reversed cable on most units with two drives, especially the ones that only come with the short, two-positions cables: both Hughes units, all Series 2 Standalone units (TiVo, AT&T and Sony) and all newer SAT-T60s.

Michael

Posted by: rcliff

Darin, I used and standard cable and built a custom bracket so the drives are back to back. I think this may improve airflow when compared to draping a cable around over the main board (maybe not). You would have to build a custom bracket though.

A photo is at this URL
http://www.pbase.com/image/10000044

Posted by: weaknees

quote:
FYI - I'm not sure why ... but when I tried reversing one of the 80 pin (ATA 100?) cables the TiVo would not boot. It just stayed at the inital screen - which I believe says something like "Powering Up."

When reversing the cable, you MUST have the master at the end of the chain. If you don't, you will get the "Powering up..." message. Maybe that was your problem?

Michael

Posted by: Keven

Michael,

Thanks. Since I had the drives jumpers set for Master and Slave I didn't realize the orientation of the cable made any difference. Knowing that saved me about $20 since now I won't need to find a special cable to fit.

Keven

quote:
Originally posted by weaknees
When reversing the cable, you MUST have the master at the end of the chain. If you don't, you will get the "Powering up..." message. Maybe that was your problem?

Michael

Posted by: mike

Does anyone actually know the maximum transfer rate of a TiVo (Specifically a Sony SVR-2000), e.g., 33, 66, 100? ?

Posted by: TimTrace

Greetings:

When cabling my 2-drive HDVR2, I found it easiest to move the "A", or master, drive to the 2nd physical location (using a 9th-Tee bracket), and put the "B", or slave, drive in the original location.

I was then able to use a standard 80-conductor HDD cable, turned backwards, to connect the TiVo motherboard (black connector), slave drive (gray connector) and master drive (blue connector). I drilled out the blocked pinhole on the black connector with a Dremel tool.

I was able to fold and twist the cable so that it lay quite neatly inside the TiVo case, minimally blocking airflow.

Result? A 274GB DirecTiVo (2x 160GB Maxtor 5400 DMA133 hard disk drives), with as much as 243 hours of recording capacity.

Best regards,

Tim ==

Posted by: stevel

The Series 1 (SVR-2000) IDE controller is ATA33.

Posted by: borghe

To answer the "Which end is up" question, it doesn't matter. Drive placement is important. Which end of the cable is which is not important. The cable is "stupid". It is a 40-pin 80-conductor cable. What is important is where the motherboard and master drive sit in the chain. The mother board has to sit at one end and the master drive should sit at the other end. As long as that is true it makes no difference where the blue connector is.