HD Upgrade without Cachecard Question

[warrenrb]

Hi All,

My Tivo has been stuttering of late, little dropouts of picture and sound every so often for a few seconds. From what I read on here, my 120Gb drive could be on the way out, so....

I'm looking at new drives and obviously the chance to up the size at the same time. However, I don't really wanna fork out for a cachecard too, as I already have a turbonet card installed.

I currently have 150 odd recordings, and I like to keep my season pass list trim (unlike others around here :) ) so I usually only have about 20-25 items in it (shock horror!) - 22 at the moment of which 4 are simple title wishlists.

So looking at drives today, I can get 160Gb, 200Gb, 250Gb all for around the same price. It seems silly to get a smaller drive for the same money, and I was wondering if it was more about the number of season passes and recordings, than the actual size of the drive that a cachecard effects?

Also, it seems sensible to get a faster drive if poss., but again I've read on here that it doesn't make a difference to performance of tivo, and 5400 would run cooler and quieter than a 7200. Is this true about there being no difference? And does the disk cache make any difference? Sorry I'm not a tech head when it comes to this stuff. :(

Thanks,
Warren.

[mikerr]

If you're going to transfer the drive complete with recordings bear in mind the time estimates are way off - I had a 40GB drive with 15 recordings on it take over 20 hours to transfer - I could have archived to DVD quicker...

A simple "everything but recordings" backup/restore is just a few minutes.

[6022tivo]

I would also recommend a backup and restore everything minus recordings, should take only a few minutes compared to a day or two, especially if your 120gb is starting to fail..

I have my Cachecard and to be honest do not notice much of a speed increase, only have a 120GB. I was even thinking of selling it.

I would not worry about 7200 and 5400 drives. 7200 do not get as warm or are as noisy as years ago. 5400's are hard to find nowadays.

I would look for drives with a good warrenty 3yr at least. Samsungs are highly rated for long term AV reliability.

[johala_reewi]

You don't need a cachecard to upgrade to a larger HD. All a cachecard gives you is a network connection (you already have one with turbonet) and the opportunity to cache the Tivo database (about 512Mb) in RAM. If you go bigger than 120Gb, you will need to patch the Tivo kernal as part of the upgrade process. For recommended HDDs, checkout Samsung or the new Seagates, or if you are a bit short of cash, a seagate barracuda will work fine.

This thread will help you...
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=294419

Upgrade instructions can be found here...
http://www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo/index.html

[warrenrb]

Thanks for all the advice...

I think I'd have to bite the bullet and transfer the shows as well - there are things I just couldn't afford to lose on there - the wife'd kill me!

Interesting about the cachecard 6022tivo. I guess I can see how it goes and get one at a later stage if it's sluggish? My current 120Gb drive is fine speed wise atm.

If you were selling your cachecard, but still wanted network access to that tivo, maybe we could do a swap (turbonet plus cash for your cachecard)?

[6022tivo]

.

If you were selling your cachecard, but still wanted network access to that tivo, maybe we could do a swap (turbonet plus cash for your cachecard)?

Probably, let me know. I am not going anywhere... lol

[Prof. Yaffle]

I upgraded my 120gb failing drive to a 300gb Samsung Spinpoint a couple of weeks ago and with 6 pages of recordings it still didn't take long to copy everything including shows. I used an old AMD Athlon 800Mhz PC. What seemed to make a huge difference then compared to doing the same for 40gb to 120gb was enabling DMA on each drive and also having each drive on a seperate 80 conductor IDE cable. After 3 hours it wasn't complete but when I checked back at 4 hours it had finished already.

[warrenrb]

Sounds Good Professor! I'll try and follow your setup when I do it.

I notice in your sig. file you have an airnet, not a cachecard. Can you throw in your opinion about using a large drive without a cachecard, speedwise? Any problems?

[Prof. Yaffle]

To enable DMA on each drive use hdparm -d1 /dev/hdx with the x replaced by each drive. The only thing that worried me when I was copying drives was when it came to what I assume where bad sectors on the originial HDD it would appear that the pc had locked but after a while it would start going again (only happened a couple of times that I saw).

With regards speed, at the moment I've only filled it to approx 65% (according to Autospace) and tbh I haven't noticed any real speed difference. There's possibly a slight delay when moving through Now Playing but not noticably different to when I had a 120gb drive. I must admit to having a clearout of SP's that are never likely to come back or I've caught up with by other mean before I upgraded the drive. I went from approx 130 SP's to approx 100 and the only SP changes I've actually done on TiVo is changing everything to Mode 0 Best quality. Everything else I've done by Sanderton's season pass util for TiVoweb. I'm sure once I start to fill the drive with more recordings and Season Passes I'll start to see slowdown but at present it's perfectly usable. :up: