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Hard Drive Upgrade Info

832K views 3K replies 437 participants last post by  austinsho 
#1 ·
Upgrade your Roamio with a new drive. No discs needed.

What you need:
T8 Screw driver
T10 Screw Driver
New Hard Drive

 
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#377 ·
Just ordered a Roamio Basic and a 3TB WD30EURS from Amazon.. This will replace my two 1TB S3s w/Lifetime.. Looking forward to 1 TiVo with all my videos in one place, four tuners and an RF remote so I can control it from all the TVs without dealing with IR distribution.. :D

Just have to wait until Wednesday to get it and start the upgrade.... :rolleyes:

PS. Since I used a Amazon Store card, I also got 6mos interest free.... cool.
Please let us know how the 3TB works in the basic, thanks! :D
 
#378 ·
If you use the WD green power saver drive do you have to enable the park feature in order to have the drive not wear itself out after a couple of months?
The AV drives like WD20EURS come with Intellipark already disabled, but the regular Green drives like a WD20EZRX will come with it set for 8 seconds, so in the past you have to disable it or set it higher to get a Tivo to boot past the first screen, we dont know if you still have to do that yet. With a Tivo the heads will never park anyhow, they write 24/7.
 
#380 ·
If you use the WD green power saver drive do you have to enable the park feature in order to have the drive not wear itself out after a couple of months?
Near as I can tell from what I read, keeping the intellipark feature enabled, at least with the default setting, can reduce the service life of the drive as there are a limited number of times it can park. This is if it is going in a PC.

In a TiVo, the only time it comes into play is on a soft boot. It never parks during normal operation. It does get parked when it goes idle during the boot process and it does not get "un-parked" fast enough when queried by the TiVo.

At least that is my understanding of the issue but there is some annecdotal evidence that it has been addressed and is no longer an issue.
 
#381 ·
If TiVo is really worried about it they will put a "warranty void if broken" type of seal on the retail units. Until then, they have no way of knowing (unless they are logging to the flash drive via log file and will go through the trouble of investigating it) if you replaced the drive, especially if you put the original back in before having it services.
I believe they can tell once you connect your upgraded tivo to the network. At a minimum they can tell how many recording hours your new hdd provides.
 
#382 ·
or at least do so without destroying that label... I was able to open/close my S3s and that void label never moved since the label was never stuck to anything but the outer cover... hehehe
Well, technically Apple tells you that opening up their computers similarly voids your warranty, but I know many people who have hacked their Macs with different parts and never heard of one of them getting grief from Apple if they made a warranty claim.

If TiVo is really worried about it they will put a "warranty void if broken" type of seal on the retail units. Until then, they have no way of knowing (unless they are logging to the flash drive via log file and will go through the trouble of investigating it) if you replaced the drive, especially if you put the original back in before having it services.
As noted above, they at least used to do that very thing.

Besides, the Roamio has built-in wireless. Didn't you know about the built-in camera? The NSA insisted. :D
 
#383 ·
What's the deal with 4TB hdd prices anyway? I bought 2 seagate external 4 TB drives for $140 each several months ago. There was an instant rebate involved, but still I didn't think it would take this long for that price to be common. Seems like it's a long way away now. Wish I had bought a spare now! I would love to have a 4TB drive in my tivo.

Thanks for the research early adopters! Looking forward to seeing the rest of the story unfold.
 
#384 ·
If you use the WD green power saver drive do you have to enable the park feature in order to have the drive not wear itself out after a couple of months?
Do you already have a drive you plan to use? If not then my suggestion is to just go ahead and get one of the AV drives and then you can just pop it in and not worry with it. There wont be that much difference in the price and an AV drive is designed for a DVR/Tivo.
 
#385 ·
What's the deal with 4TB hdd prices anyway? I bought 2 seagate external 4 TB drives for $140 each several months ago. There was an instant rebate involved, but still I didn't think it would take this long for that price to be common. Seems like it's a long way away now. Wish I had bought a spare now! I would love to have a 4TB drive in my tivo.

Thanks for the research early adopters! Looking forward to seeing the rest of the story unfold.
Yeah, I know.. I really wanted a 4TB but the price was $199 no matter where I looked and I either had to pay for Tax, shipping or both...

That is one of the main reasons I just went with the WD 3TB, got it for $138 w/Prime and the 6mos interest free... Since I only had 2TB already this is still 1TB more video storage...

If the 3TB does not work.. no loss, I will just use it in my Drobo's (which currently only have 1.5 & 2TBs). Now, if I could only hook a Drobo up as the external drive.... hehe
 
#386 ·
Just ordered a Roamio Basic and a 3TB WD30EURS from Amazon.. This will replace my two 1TB S3s w/Lifetime.. Looking forward to 1 TiVo with all my videos in one place, four tuners and an RF remote so I can control it from all the TVs without dealing with IR distribution.. :D

Just have to wait until Wednesday to get it and start the upgrade.... :rolleyes:
  • Monday - WD30EURS arrives
  • Tuesday - Roamio Basic arrives
  • Thursday - Cable guy arrives to remove 2 HD DVRs, install Tuning Adapter and Cable Card.

:D
 
#390 ·
So, based on what has been documented here so far, a year down the road and I find I'm running low on space on my Plus, I should be able to buy a new larger drive, remove my old drive, plug both into my PC, drag and drop everything from my old HD to my new HD, plug the new one into my Tivo, go through setup, then be back to where I was with my same recorded shows and more space?
 
#392 ·
Uh, then why has TiVo been using AV-GP drives all this time? They are GreenPower drives as well, with an additional AV-rating. That's what the "GP" means in "AV-GP".

Don't take it the wrong way. But, as you say, you're not up to speed on this. Before the AV-GP drives fell drastically in price, everybody was using the standard GreenPower drives, without the AV rating (less those who had the extra money to spend, and wanted the AV-GP).
"GreenPower" is just WD's stupid word for a 5400RPM drive.

If you want to get really technical, the WD Red "NAS-specific" drives are also "GreenPower" because they spin around 5400.

Prior to the areal density on HDDs being as good as it is now, a 5400 RPM drive was generally a lot slower than a 7200RPM disk, so WD and other manufacturers stopped advertising that the drive was 5400RPM due to the stigma. Instead we got "Green" drives, and they would be vague about the RPMS "5900 RPM average, variable speed" BS like that.

For a DVR that is recording fat stripes of linear data at around 8-15 Mbps, 5400RPM drives are plenty.

The only real difference between the "GP" and the "AV-GP" models is the tuning of the firmware, the MTBF listed on the box, and the warranty length.
 
#393 ·
So, based on what has been documented here so far, a year down the road and I find I'm running low on space on my Plus, I should be able to buy a new larger drive, remove my old drive, plug both into my PC, drag and drop everything from my old HD to my new HD, plug the new one into my Tivo, go through setup, then be back to where I was with my same recorded shows and more space?
Everything that is bolded is not true. Just read what I quoted and literally skip the bolded parts to see what is true.

No drag and drop or saving your shows is possible (Yet). We are only talking about removing the existing drive, plugging in a new drive and having it automatically work. You would have to complete guided setup as if you just bought the TiVo and you would lose all your existing recordings.
 
#394 ·
So, based on what has been documented here so far, a year down the road and I find I'm running low on space on my Plus, I should be able to buy a new larger drive, remove my old drive, plug both into my PC, drag and drop everything from my old HD to my new HD, plug the new one into my Tivo, go through setup, then be back to where I was with my same recorded shows and more space?
I haven't seen anything posted here that indicates that is a possibility. It wouldn't work like that for a computer, why would you expect it to work for a TiVo?
 
#395 ·
So, based on what has been documented here so far, a year down the road and I find I'm running low on space on my Plus, I should be able to buy a new larger drive, remove my old drive, plug both into my PC, drag and drop everything from my old HD to my new HD, plug the new one into my Tivo, go through setup, then be back to where I was with my same recorded shows and more space?
No, we don't know if that's possible yet with the new units.

The discussion thus far has been centered around the ability to remove the drive in the unit, and insert a new one, and have it work automatically - this never happened in the past with Tivos.

Since some amount of configuration / setting info is stored on the HDD, you presumably would have to walk through setup with the new drive, as though it was a brand new unit.

The "drag and drop from the old to the new" part hasn't really been looked at yet, to my knowledge. It seems like the new Series5 units have a different format on the drive entirely, so that will be something that people will have to hack away at. :)
 
#396 ·
So, based on what has been documented here so far, a year down the road and I find I'm running low on space on my Plus, I should be able to buy a new larger drive, remove my old drive, plug both into my PC, drag and drop everything from my old HD to my new HD, plug the new one into my Tivo, go through setup, then be back to where I was with my same recorded shows and more space?
No, thats not it at all. You cant just copy on a desktop with drag and drop. What is being described here is putting a blank drive in the Roamio and having it format it and load software to it. You would have to use other tools to copy from one drive to another preserving recordings. Not the topic under discussion.
 
#398 ·
Someone with good organizational skills and good knowledge of the forum software needs to write a FAQ on this upgrade method similar to the old upgrade threads.

So, based on what has been documented here so far, a year down the road and I find I'm running low on space on my Plus, I should be able to buy a new larger drive, remove my old drive, plug both into my PC, drag and drop everything from my old HD to my new HD, plug the new one into my Tivo, go through setup, then be back to where I was with my same recorded shows and more space?
Nope.

All we know for certain right now is a brand new TiVo off the shelf never setup will take a new drive and properly configure it for use. A 2TB drive is the only drive that has been tested on a base Roamio.
 
#400 ·
Yeah, I was doing some speculation. Actually if the setup info is stored on the hd, you shouldn't have to go through setup again if you copy the drive contents over.
But if you just copied the old drive then there is no way for it to see the extra space and actually use it. Some sort of hacking has to be done for what you're describing to be possible. Could be as simple as flipping some bits to tell the TiVo there's more space available or it could be monumentally more difficult then that. We don't really know yet.
 
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