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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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#573 ·
Question for those of you who have installed a replacement drive, and also to those who haven't - what 'Manufacturer Brand' does your Roamio list in System Information? Mine has 'TiVo Customer Support' and I have a replacement drive installed. I'm curious if this is different on an unmodified unit.
I did "NOT" change my drive and my pro unit also says "TiVo Customer Support"
 
#575 ·
Thanks for your responses regarding "Manufacturer Brand" - happy to hear it's consistent across all units. I lol'd at lpwcomp's interpretation :D

I transferred several hundred GB of shows from an old Premiere to my Roamio yesterday without issues. I also used the new Netflix client for an impromptu binge viewing of the first season of 'The Fall'. It looked and sounded great. So far so good!
 
#578 ·
Yes, it will just work. I'd get a 3TB WD AV-GP. I bought the 2TB version for my Basic.
Alot of peple must be ordering the Wd 3TB AV drives. Amazon had a bunch last week for around $137 but by Sunday there were only a few left. And everytime I checked it there were fewer until they were finally out. Since the price with shipping is around $8 more now and the drive is also more at Newegg. I had been considering the upgrade route but went with the Roamio Pro instead.
 
#580 ·
Wow. TCF crashed because it was too busy, so I'll shorten this post.

In Full Backup mode DvrBARS could care less what's on the drive. If it was a 10TB source and all zeroes it would end up with an image of a few hundred KB that I could analyze.

This Husky torx screwdriver is what I bought at Home Depot years ago. T4-T15 for about $6.

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Husky-8-IN-1-Torx-Screwdriver-Set-74502/100087664

Images welcome (hint, hint).
I just backed up a blank 500Mb drive using DvrBARS, (I know it is blank because I did a low level format on the full drive) the file size was about 980Kb, and a restore was not possible with DvrBARS. The full backup took many hours, I will try this with the virgin 1Tb drive in my new Plus coming on the 28th, but I think the drive will be blank.
 
#582 ·
Yes, it will just work. I'd get a 3TB WD AV-GP. I bought the 2TB version for my Basic.
Yep, the one I ordered and it arrived this morning (a day early)...

Alot of peple must be ordering the Wd 3TB AV drives. Amazon had a bunch last week for around $137 but by Sunday there were only a few left. And everytime I checked it there were fewer until they were finally out. Since the price with shipping is around $8 more now and the drive is also more at Newegg. I had been considering the upgrade route but went with the Roamio Pro instead.
Basically, after amseven11 showed how easy the upgrade was, the floodgates opened and folks started buying (including me). Since the 4TB are still expensive and there is a rumor of a possible hitch in using the 4TB, most are playing safe with the 3TB.

So, it doesn't surprise me at all that Amazon is currently out of WD AV-GP 3TB drives.
 
#586 ·
Alot of peple must be ordering the Wd 3TB AV drives. Amazon had a bunch last week for around $137 but by Sunday there were only a few left. And everytime I checked it there were fewer until they were finally out. Since the price with shipping is around $8 more now and the drive is also more at Newegg. I had been considering the upgrade route but went with the Roamio Pro instead.
Yeah, it keeps going in and out of stock, directly from Amazon. Anyone interested should just keep checking.
 
#588 ·
I hope someone will try out a 4TB and let us know if it works!

I have a question, what is a difference between a Seagate Pipeline or WD Video drive vs a normal hard drive? Does it actually make a difference?
Yeah, really hoping someone will try the 4TB Seagate drive. I'm tempted to do it when I get a Roamio but I don't really have any use for a 4TB drive outside of the Tivo.
 
#590 ·
I hope someone will try out a 4TB and let us know if it works!
Weaknees has said there are issues trying to use 4TB. So I think you will find most people here reluctant to try one, unless they happen to have one laying around they are willing to play with. Certainly no one would buy one just for this purpose, until more info is available.
 
#592 ·
I just backed up a blank 500Mb drive using DvrBARS, (I know it is blank because I did a low level format on the full drive) the file size was about 980Kb, and a restore was not possible with DvrBARS. The full backup took many hours, I will try this with the virgin 1Tb drive in my new Plus coming on the 28th, but I think the drive will be blank.
I kinda agree with you. That is still useful information once we can verify it. Another important information point is what partitions are actually created / stored right after the drive is ready for prime time.
 
#593 ·
I kinda agree with you. That is still useful information once we can verify it. Another important information point is what partitions are actually created / stored right after the drive is ready for prime time.
I get my Plus on the 28th and will be testing as much as I can.
 
#594 ·
I just backed up a blank 500Mb drive using DvrBARS, (I know it is blank because I did a low level format on the full drive) the file size was about 980Kb, and a restore was not possible with DvrBARS. The full backup took many hours, I will try this with the virgin 1Tb drive in my new Plus coming on the 28th, but I think the drive will be blank.
That was a very good idea, to try that.

I wonder why it took so long... I used DVRBARS, in Full-Backup Mode, to backup a TiVo HD 2TB drive as well as a Premiere 2-tuner 2TB drive. It only took 4 hours, per drive, via USB3-to-SATA3 StarTech dual drive dock, on a three year old budget laptop, with a USB3 SIIG expresscard adapter (NEC chipset), running Win7 Home Premium 64-bit.

EDIT/ADD: I did change the priority level in Task Manager to "realtime" for DVRBARS, and made sure nothing unnecessary was running, as well as not doing any other tasks. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I never tried leaving the priority at "normal", just to see if it did.

I also bought a similar StarTech dual drive dock, with one bay for PATA, but it wouldn't work, the drive(s) would just make horrible noises once spun-up, and would spin-down, spin-back up, and DVRBARS aborted. Likely was unlucky enough to get a bad dock, and waited over 30 days to try it out...
 
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