Connecting an external hard drive to the Tivo via USB

[geetarandsushi]

I wonder if this will be possible down the road...

[W Auggie H]

Sort of... but maybe not the way you are thinking. The forthcoming TiVoToGo will sort of let you do that. In theory, TiVoToGo will let us copy content off our TiVo boxes to our computer. From there we can have a large drive and archive our shows off to it.

I am sure some will argue that it is or isn't possible to attach a usb hard drive. I don't believe that is the road TiVo is going down.

[geetarandsushi]

yup I heard that. That would be pretty cool. I wonder how much longer we'd have to wait.

[JimSpence]

About as long as it takes for hell to freeze over. Well, maybe only half that time.:)

I suspect that the USB hard drive would have to be connected to the PC.

[ZeoTiVo]

why just a USB hard drive connected to the PC
how about a portable video player with a hard drive you hook to your PC via USB. You have a stash of shows on your PC from TiVoToGo and pick the ones you want to take along and transfer them to the portable video player (which is basically a USB hard drive with an LCD screen)


until 3rd party players get on board then someone will probably figure out the steps to use a USB external Hard drive on the PC when TiVoToGo comes out.

[maggard]

I was told, by an engineer at a certain TiVo supplier, that this is in the cards, indeed has been for a long time. The downside is last time we spoke he mentioned he'd been working on Firewire/IEEE 1394 code so it is possible TiVo may be holding off on this 'til a next-generation box ships.

My own *guess* is TiVo won't enable any of this until they're sure the material is locked down, at least enough so they can say they tried. Thus I'd expect TivoToGo to have been out a bit and battle tested before this comes to pass.

[geetarandsushi]

so they are saying that you can simply plug a hard drive into the back of a tivo, and voila! Extra space?

[zeroduck]

It certainly is possible, using open source drivers.

But, the part you dont realize is how much testing it takes in order to roll out features like that.

[maggard]

Originally posted by geetarandsushi
so they are saying that you can simply plug a hard drive into the back of a tivo, and voila! Extra space?

Not quite.


TiVo has to enable the connection.
Original Series2 TiVos are USB 1.1, newer have USB 2. So far TiVo has only included drivers enabling USB 1.1 functionality. However adding & enabling USB 2 should be easy, especially as those drivers are now fairly mature & stable.

You will need a reasonably fast connection.
USB1.1 is slooow for hard drive access. USB2 is fast but involves some significant CPU overhead. Firewire/IEEE 1394 is fast & low load but not ubiquitous, I don't know of any TiVo's with it. FWIW Firewire/IEEE 1394 is also a digital video standard so including/using it is a two-fer, indeed it's the planned interconnect for most future video devices.

TiVo needs to enable external drive support.
Like USB 2 the drivers for external hot-connect drives are now a mature, stable, well understood technology. TiVo can leverage upon it's Linux OS and port those drivers to their specific platform with little effort or concern, but it is an item that has to be done & QA'd (assuming it hasn't already been done in-house.)

You will need a properly formatted hard drive.
TiVo's use a Linux-type disk format, EXT2. Most consumer external drives come formatted (if they are at all) for a Windows format, typically FAT32. So either TiVo will need to include a disk formatting routine (trivial) or you'll need to do a bit of prep work. Not hard, but it is an additional step.

TiVo has to let the data go free, or at least, free-er.
As noted above, TiVo is likely loathe to make access to their material easy. Sure one can pull a drive from inside a TiVo, copy it, mess around with it, replace it, etc. That's still more difficult then explicitly enabling external portable drives. Some sort of content protection is certain, exactly like we're hearing about for TiVo-ToGo. Thus it's reasonable this will follow that.


The first hump will be telling all of us USB1.1 folks we're 2nd class citizens. With USB 2 drivers suddenly allowing all of those with USB 2 to run a theoretical 40x faster we'll be dinged. We won't lose anything, we'll just not be as fast/shiny/kewl as the others.

Porting the drivers should take only a few days of engineering time, if that. QA would take longer but I'm betting they've had this stuff in-house for a while so it should be good to go. It's possible CPU overhead is a limiting factor but I doubt it, keep in mind the basic TiVo data architecture is tuned fairly loosely (witness sharing working over those USB 1.1 connections.)

Digital Rights Management - who owns our shows, whose rights are being managed? We paid for the service, the channel, the TiVo, still that's the biggest baddest impediment.

[Edited to correct a tense]

[Jonathan_S]

Originally posted by maggard

You will need a properly formatted hard drive.
TiVo's use a Linux-type disk format, EXT2. Most consumer external drives come formatted (if they are at all) for a Windows format, typically FAT32. So either TiVo will need to include a disk formatting routine (trivial) or you'll need to do a bit of prep work. Not hard, but it is an additional step. Not quite. While the TiVo software is installed on a EXT2 partition the videos are stored on a TiVo proprietary file system called MFS (media file system).

Of course that doesn't really change your point, its just a technical correction on the filesystem type.

[ZeoTiVo]

Still why go through all that work from TiVos perspective if TiVoToGo takes off and you can easily just use a USB drive on your PCs

[mantene]

Well, becuase external hard drives can be expensive. More people have Home networks than external hard drives.

[maggard]

Originally posted by Jonathan_S
Not quite. While the TiVo software is installed on a EXT2 partition the videos are stored on a TiVo proprietary file system called MFS (media file system).

Of course that doesn't really change your point, its just a technical correction on the filesystem type.

Thanks!

I couldn't remember if TiVo used EXT2 for the show files & their home-brew MFS for the TiVo-code, made a 60/40 call and was wrong. Thanks for the correction.

Actually it does add another item on the ToDo list for TiVo: Put together & QA a format routine for MFS that works over USB1/2 and/or Firewire/IEEE 1394. Or adjust the TiVo architecture to support another disk format for external drives, probably FAT32 for compatibility.

Hmmm, I wonder if MacOS X supports reading NTFS natively? I know it does FAT32 but NTFS is a bit faster and more robust. 'Course NTFS'd annoy all of the Win9x folks.

[maggard]

Originally posted by mantene
Well, becuase external hard drives can be expensive. More people have Home networks than external hard drives.
A consumer grade home router runs about US$20 for a generic these days, cabling probably averages another US$20.

A consumer grade 802.11b wireless router costs about US$20 for the router and a bit less for the client cards. A good consumer 802.11g router costs about US$60, about US$40 for the cards.

A generic External USB1/2 Firewire drive shell is about US$30 plus the cost of the drive inside. Drives are going for about US$.50 per GB these days. For a brand name external drive figure about $1 per GB (basically double the price of a nekkid drive.)

Lots of folks are using external drives at home for backup purposes. They plug it into a target PC and dump everything to it over night, then unplug it and put it someplace safe-ish 'til the next backup (or restore). It's not as reliable as tape backup but it is less overhead and reasonably effective.

By the way, an Apple or HP iPod is basically a small external drive: They comes out to about US$10 to US$12.50 a GB.


*All these prices are what you'd pay online, not at a CompUSA or some BigBox-R-Us next to the toaster ovens & clothes washers.

[bdmayo]

Ok, more than a year has passed since the last post in this thread. Are there any changes to this subject? Can a USB case with whatever sized hard drive be attached to the Tivo?

Even if the recorded shows are in a format that only the Tivo will recgnize.

[dgh]

Are there any changes to this subject?

Pictures of the S3 prototype show a SATA connector.

[ChuckyBox]

Ok, more than a year has passed since the last post in this thread. Are there any changes to this subject? Can a USB case with whatever sized hard drive be attached to the Tivo?

Even if the recorded shows are in a format that only the Tivo will recgnize.
Certainly not with an unhacked TiVo. You might poke around the "underground" hacker forums a bit and see what people have done.

I think it would be a nice feature to have a sort-of data warehouse connected to your TiVo via USB -- an archive onto which you could dump, and from which you could retrieve, more material. Yes, you can do this now with TTG and TiVoComeBack and your PC, but it is slow and awkward and requires another device. And, yes, you could just put the material on a DVD if you have a burner. But this would be a simple, fast, elegant way to increase storage. The material could be stored in TiVo-native format, and maybe not even be movable to another TiVo, so I don't see DRM concerns.

Operation would be simple: You plug in the drive, TiVo sees it and gives you a new menu option: "Archive." You open it up and you can transfer shows back and forth from the internal drive to the archive. Sweet.

[ZeoTiVo]

it was more than a picture - they had a working SATA connection and had an external drive that was working. However it was not the cool archive type idea that I would like as well as ChuckyBox would want to see. for this one the shows would be recorded and the TiVo file system will decide how shows get stored and on which drive. Shows might even get stored across both drives. So if you remove the drive shows just dissapear and you do not know which ones it will be.

now there was also an ethernet port on the S3 and that has the potential to make things twice as fast. if that happens than TTG and TTCB become quite useful as a way to archive to drives in a PC

[ChuckyBox]

now there was also an ethernet port on the S3 and that has the potential to make things twice as fast. if that happens than TTG and TTCB become quite useful as a way to archive to drives in a PC
Yeah, the S3 will be a different story -- more storage options because of the SATA port and (hopefully) faster TTG transfers.

But there are tons of series 2 boxes out there that could have a nice little upgrade if you could add a USB archive drive. I think it would be a pretty easy software upgrade for TiVo to implement, and would make a lot of people happy.

[peteypete]

Can someone explain what SATA is and why it is better than USB?

My 300gb tivo is full now and I'd like to dump directly to a external hard drive without going through TTG to a computer.

Why is this hard? With tivo now making a branded wifi adapter, can't they make a branded add on hard drive?

I mean technically, isnt' it kinda easy?

[classicsat]

PATA is the connection. current HDDs so. It is maxed out in bandwidth essentially. SATA is redesign of that over serial, and is faster.

SATA is better than USB, becasue at it, works directly with the drive, as it is exclusively a drive connection standard.. ESATA, as the S3 has, just brings the drive bus outside the device box.

USB is a general peripheral bus, which mass storage is a higher level function of. You might not want to use it on a TiVo for an HDD,as it will be slow, for the newer TiVos use a rather slow USB 2.0 port.

[ZeoTiVo]

Can someone explain what SATA is and why it is better than USB?

Plain English of what Classicsat said ;)
the SATA does not demand any CPU resources as it works at hardware level

the USB will demand at best the CPU give it interrrupts and timing.
at worst (on the 540) the USB uses CPU resources as the chips were cheap and do not do all teh USB work. It would be a significant overhead on the TiVo and most likely prohibitive.

[maggard]

Can someone explain what SATA is and why it is better than USB?
SATA is the new generation hard drive connection. When you go shopping for a new hard drive these days it's usually offered in PATA (Parallel ATA) or SATA (Serial ATA) for the same price. SATA connectors & cables are smaller (hence neater / easier / less blocking) then the big ribbon cables of PATA and they offer faster transfer speeds.

USB 1 (& 1.1) is the original USB, intended for keyboards & mice and the like. USB 2 is up to 40x faster and is acceptable, if not particularly fast, as a hard drive connection. The upside is nearly everyone has 'em. The downside is that it takes a big CPU hit to operate. USB drives are usually just a shell with a power supply and USB <-> PATA or SATA adapter in 'em.

My 300gb tivo is full now and I'd like to dump directly to a external hard drive without going through TTG to a computer.

Why is this hard? With tivo now making a branded wifi adapter, can't they make a branded add on hard drive?

I mean technically, isnt' it kinda easy?
They could, but for three issues:


TiVo would need a USB Mass Storage Device driver for their units. They'd also need a drive formatter, or a driver for talking to whatever format the drive is already in. As TiVo's software is Linux-based and there are plenty of fairly mature reference designs for all of this shouldn't be a big deal, but figure some effort for development, Q/A, distribution, & support.


TiVo would need a business reason for doing so. Right now most folks who want to upgrade their TiVos are encouraged to do so by buying newer larger models, or additional units. In either case that likely translates into more subscriptions, which is what pays most of TiVo's bills. Making it trivial to plug in a another hard drive is a a disincentive for that.


Finally TiVo walks a fine line between enabling sharing and not. Making you record to a VCR, pipe stuff through a PC, to a hard drive (internal or plug-in external), or DVD, or whatever, is a hassle that allows 'em to claim some content protection. With a few clicks dropping 300GB of "Cat Fancier TV" to a portable drive then taking it with you to cousin Beth's is probably too easy for their, or more realistically "The Industry's", comfort.

Yeah, it'd be nice, and it'd be neat, but lots of things would be. Looking at the size of the market wanting this and the payback vs. cost I just don't see it happening. Perhaps with the Series 3, but even then I have my doubts.

[lessd]

S3 has shown a Sata port on it which will do the job of an external HD, the 540 series does not have enough computing power to operate an external HD like their internal HD. The fastest speed I have seen on the 540's USB port is about 9MB/s My own external USB hard drive only works at about 13MB/s on my PC. From HD to HD inside my 3.06G PC I can get about 40MB/s. TiVo is not a high power PC.

[ZeoTiVo]

Yeah, it'd be nice, and it'd be neat, but lots of things would be. Looking at the size of the market wanting this and the payback vs. cost I just don't see it happening. Perhaps with the Series 3, but even then I have my doubts.


TiVo showed at CES this year the Series 3 with an SATA port to be able to hook up an SATA external drive. Makes hard drive upgrades very easy :up:

for the industry 'comfort level' the external drive just becomes more of the same proprietary file system. Shows may or may not go to the external drive and they may even span both internal and external drives. Once you unplug the external drive any shows on it are not useable in other ways. I was not clear on if it marreid at the account level or DVR level but the drive was definitely not about portability, just exapndability.

[maggard]

TiVo showed at CES this year the Series 3 with an SATA port to be able to hook up an SATA external drive.

...

I was not clear on if it marreid at the account level or DVR level but the drive was definitely not about portability, just exapndability.
Right, I saw the same. However that wasn't a production unit but rather a for-CES demo unit, so nothing definitive there (& was that Darth Vader's personal TiVo remote off of the Deathstar?!). In any case making the external filesystem(s) entirely separate from the internal would be a trivial change.

With hard drive prices dropping and high definition recordings taking up so much space I expect TiVo will tacitly encourage drive expansion in the S3, especially as an external SATA connection requires nothing more then that: No addt'l drivers, CPU load, etc. Buy the coordinated TiVo model or deal-du-jure, plug it in and and don't bother TiVo with the details.

But anything that encourages bulk portability of material, no. Jump through hoops, put it on DVD or some personal player, or even on an external drive attached to a computer, but not a dump-'n-go from TiVo.

[ZeoTiVo]

Right, I saw the same. However that wasn't a production unit but rather a for-CES demo unit, so nothing definitive there (& was that Darth Vader's personal TiVo remote off of the Deathstar

actually there was a video interview with TiVoPony and it was a very definitive part of the Series 3 adn easy to do. It was very definitively only going to be expanded storage with no portability. The only question TiVo had left was if they were going to make it a TiVo branded drive or let the deal of the week drives be hooked up and formatted by the DVR itself.

My guess is that was an open question because TiVo well knows the DVR could be hacked and the SATA drive be turned into portable storage of mpegs. forcing a TiVo braqnded box would give TiVo some more options on making that hard enough to do that most TiVo users would not bother.


and yes I am pretty sure that Was Darth Vader's remote - the window button was replaced by a "Destroy Planet" button ;)

[jsmeeker]

actually there was a video interview with TiVoPony and it was a very definitive part of the Series 3 adn easy to do. It was very definitively only going to be expanded storage with no portability. The only question TiVo had left was if they were going to make it a TiVo branded drive or let the deal of the week drives be hooked up and formatted by the DVR itself.



I talked to Pony about this in San Francisco the week after CES. (he brought a Series 3 to a dinner ). He said the same thing to me. The intention is for TiVo to actually market/sell a TiVo branded external drive that will be all set to go. Just plug it in, and you get more space. When I asked about using other drives, he pretty much said that the drives will need "firmaware" (or whatever, maybe the file system and "blessings") and that the TiVo branded external drives will have that. He stopped at that.

I'm sure Bob will come in here and correct any thing I may have gotten wrong. That was over a month ago, and I had a drink or three in me by the time I talked to him about it. :)

[Dan203]

I'd be willing to bet that you'll be able to "bless" your own drive and hook it up. TiVo has always been friendly to the DIY crowd and I see no reason why that wouldn't continue.

Dan

[maggard]

I talked to Pony about this in San Francisco the week after CES. (he brought a Series 3 to a dinner ).
What kind of sauce goes on a S3? WAs it on a platter or individual portions?

I'm guessing a red wine.

[jsmeeker]

What kind of sauce goes on a S3? WAs it on a platter or individual portions?

I'm guessing a red wine.


It was setup on a table. No sauce. But they go well with margaritas. :)

[lessd]

I'd be willing to bet that you'll be able to "bless" your own drive and hook it up. TiVo has always been friendly to the DIY crowd and I see no reason why that wouldn't continue.

Dan

As far as I know you can't Bless an additional drive for software 7.2xx and up. You have to format both drives together. So I doubt TiVo will make it that easy to add your own HD on the S3. You may need an external power supply and other hardware to marry the drives. You may have to purchase TiVos smallest external drive system and then Hack a larger drive using the TiVo hardware to mount your drive.

[jlb]

Not being too technical enough to really know the answer, but to allow portability, without worrying the "Industry", couldn't TiVo set up some form of "computer authorization" system like on Apple/iTunes?

For instance, could they not set up the TiVo-branded SATA drive (or others via DIY) to play only on the TiVO the drive is installed on, and also through the TiVO Desktop interface on a laptop that is owned by the same person......

Or maybe said another way...........Each TiVO has a network key assigned to it, right? So, for Networking, you have to tell your network what the Key of your TiVO is in order for it to be seen by your network. Plug the SATA drive in to TiVO and all works seamlessly. Why not have the firmware be smart enough to say, ok, you unplugged me from the TiVO and plugged me into a USB port on a computer running TiVo Desktop. If you want to playback from me now, please enter the Key to initiate playback of this program.

Or something like that...you know....2-factor authentication for the TiVO drive when not connected to TiVO directly. Theoretically, doesn't that sort of have to happen "now" (fir the S3), i.e., if you cna just plug the drive into any S3 and then it works, why couldn't you then take it and plug into another S3 and get playback, which could theoretically then be directed to another PC/DVD/etc.......Now, they must be able to restrict that, so if they can, then allowing you to be able to take your SATA drive on the road with you and be played back on your laptop should be doable, right?

I know I have rambled, but this would be a great feature to me, which would make the whole idea of taking a bunch of my own recordings on the road with me much easier.....

Ok, again, I rambled, and maybe someone can understand what I am asking......yada yada yada

[ZeoTiVo]

As far as I know you can't Bless an additional drive for software 7.2xx and up. You have to format both drives together. So I doubt TiVo will make it that easy to add your own HD on the S3. You may need an external power supply and other hardware to marry the drives. You may have to purchase TiVos smallest external drive system and then Hack a larger drive using the TiVo hardware to mount your drive.

these drives are not married in the normal sense it means today. You have two drives in a Series 2 TiVo and take one out the machine does not boot.

for the series 3 you have an external drive hooked up via SATA that can be there or not and it will boot either way. You just will not see all the shows you had before if the external is not there.

the external itself however will somehow be married to the machine or account I believe and not be able to just hook up to any TiVo box to see the shows again.
But if you get a TiVo branded external drive it will have some image and that image will most likely be figured out to be duplicated so you can do the old get a bigger drive and move the shows across or just setup a big drive from CompUSA to start working once you hook it up.

since a TiVo branded drive would not know anything about the TiVo it is first hooked to then whatever process is used to mark the external drive would just happen. So i agree with Dan that clever folk will end up figuring it out and TiVo will not be concerned about it since it involves no theft of service and is just a really nice way for TiVo to let everyone in on upgrading capacity without having to open the box and void warranty

[davidjplatt]

From what I had read, once you connect an SATA drive to the connector on the Series 3, it can't be removed. The indication was that the drive became part of the setup and was merely a one way upgrade path. It is for storage expansion only and can't be removed once hooked up. Sort of like the Series 1/2 - once you add a second drive you can't disconnect it and bring up the system on a single drive.

[ZeoTiVo]

From what I had read, once you connect an SATA drive to the connector on the Series 3, it can't be removed. The indication was that the drive became part of the setup and was merely a one way upgrade path. It is for storage expansion only and can't be removed once hooked up. Sort of like the Series 1/2 - once you add a second drive you can't disconnect it and bring up the system on a single drive.

at CES it was reported by Megazone and others that you can remove the drive, your shows would be gone but the TiVo would carry on as before and just record to the drive it had.

Once used on a TiVo the SATA drive itself would not work on a differetn TiVo to move shows around. Only on the original TiVo it started with. I imagine ways to put the drive back to new and let it hook up with another TiVo will be found if not made available by TiVo directly