Hard drive choice for upgrade

[bgaskins]

I am thinking about upgraded my series 2, 40 hour unit. I think I would like to put a 200 GB hard drive in it, so that I can record at the highest quality all of the time. My question is

How do I choose a hard drive?
Will any IDE hard drive work?
Are some better than others?
What about speeds? (It is getting hard to find big ones at 5200 RPM

Also, I plan on copying my old HD to the new larger one and storing it.
I have software version 7.2, do I need to do the swap thing to recognize the sizer larger than 137?

Thanks all!

[funtoupgrade]

How do I choose a hard drive? Do a search here on the forum and read up a little.
Will any IDE hard drive work? yes, just make sure not to get a SATA drive
Are some better than others? yes, but it depends on who you ask as to best
What about speeds? While 7200's run hotter than 5400's I don't think it is a problem.

In general, I go for the best deal. There are lots of big drives offered with great rebates from week to week.

You will have to do the "swap thing" (tpip?) for any drive larger than 250GB. The 137 limit gets taken care of with the LBA48 version of MFStools.

[ThreeSoFar]

Disagree. Do not go with the cheapest drive, especially if it's a rebate hassle.

Samsung makes great, quiet drives. Newegg.com has them for a very reasonable price, with no rebate hassle. I've upgraded 20 or so with Samsungs from newegg.

[bgaskins]

Thanks a lot!! This will be a great help to me!

[Stylin]

The units come with Maxtor which seems to be a preferred choice. Also Seagate is preferred b/c of the 5 yr warranty. Some ppl really like Western Digital.
Here is some threads to look at:
Hard Drives (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=290680&page=1&pp=30)
and
Hard Drive Specials (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=254547&page=1&pp=30)

[Narf54321]

I've been using Seagates becuase they've held up well for me. In the past I've had failures with Fuji, Maxtor, and Western Digital at various points so I'm a bit gunshy about anything except Seagate. Some recent comments about Seagate are not so good, though, and especially harsh about the 7200.8 series drives.
Seagate's don't seem to respond to acoustic managment software (like Hitachi's HD Feature Tool).

I can tell you this: My 300G Seagate drives are a helluva lot louder (and hotter) than the older 120G drives. On a whim I got a Western Digital external 250G USB drive (it was cheap) and extracted the drive -- hopes of saving the case for something else were short-lived as it had tonnes of easily broken plastic catches everywhere. Crappy 1yr warranty, too. Anyway, even after setting the acoustic mgmt the WD makes a lot of clickity clickity sound while it works, and its super hot so I'm not impressed with it as a Tivo drive.

I'm intrigued by ThreeSoFar's luck with Samsung. I think I'll give those a try next time.

[BillyBob_jcv]

Some (maybe most, but I don't know for sure) drives have "acoustic management" functions in their firmware that allow the drive to be set-up for loud seeking (max performance) or quiet seeking (min performance). I set my maxtors to the quietest setting and it made a big difference in the seek clicking/ticking with no effect on recording/playback. I used this tool from Hitachi:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/downloads/ftool_200.iso