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View Full Version : New disk, glitchy video, HDD seeking like crazy..

scoob8000
11-19-2006, 01:30 PM
Just upgrade from my 80 to 200gb drive in my series 2.

Everything boots up fine, but the drive is seeking like crazy (sounds like a drive while it's being defragmented)..

Recordings play fine, live tv is too glitchy to even watch.

Sound like a problem with the drive copy, or is tivo just indexing this new drive or something. I don't recall it doing this the last time I upgraded..

Anyone else see this?
spike2k5
11-19-2006, 04:43 PM
Just upgrade from my 80 to 200gb drive in my series 2.

Everything boots up fine, but the drive is seeking like crazy (sounds like a drive while it's being defragmented)..

Recordings play fine, live tv is too glitchy to even watch.

Sound like a problem with the drive copy, or is tivo just indexing this new drive or something. I don't recall it doing this the last time I upgraded..

Anyone else see this?

Try deleting few old recordings and see if it helps any.
scoob8000
11-19-2006, 07:37 PM
This makes perfect sense. My recently deleted recordings folder was completely full.

I'll go for round 2 later.. :)

Thx
c3
11-20-2006, 03:50 AM
Are you using a Maxtor drive manufactured in 2005?
scoob8000
11-20-2006, 06:56 AM
Are you using a Maxtor drive manufactured in 2005?

Wow, yes. Did I miss something there?
c3
11-20-2006, 12:49 PM
That drive is not compatible with TiVo, and it may have issues with PC as well. Get one made in 2006.
scoob8000
11-20-2006, 03:23 PM
That drive is not compatible with TiVo, and it may have issues with PC as well. Get one made in 2006.

Any idea what makes it not compatable? I've been running it with Windows XP for about a year with no problems. It passes the maxtor test utility and spinrite 6.
c3
11-20-2006, 03:30 PM
My guess is that the drive is very slow, so Tivo cannot get the data it needs in time.
pokegol
11-20-2006, 03:55 PM
I had the same problem with a Maxtor 200gb drive. Much reading later I found that some of the Maxtor Diamondmax 10 drives exhibited this kind of behavor. Replaced it with a 250gb Samsung and all is well.
scoob8000
11-20-2006, 04:42 PM
No offense, but I'm not sure if I'm buying it. It's a standard hard drive, otherwise there would be compatibility issues with PC's.

I'm going to try the upgrade again, just out of curiosity, without keeping my recordings. Spike's explanation makes sense. My old drive was completely full, and something with the filesystem and being expanded probably caused issues..

I'll be sure to post the results. Worst case I have a 200gb seagate I can swap with this one.
pokegol
11-20-2006, 06:00 PM
Ahhhhh, but in TiVoland, all hard drives are not the same. I wouldn't have believed it myself, but it definitely happened to me.

One thing you have to take into consideration is that the power supply in a TiVo is not the same as it is in a PC. It doesn't have the wattage available that a PC power supply has. I think that this is probably the reason that certain drives don't work, they draw too much power in bursts than the TiVo can deliver. But who knows?

Swap the Maxtor with the Seagate now. You'll be glad you did :).
c3
11-20-2006, 06:47 PM
A PC does not care if the data is returned in 1 millisecond or 1 second, but TiVo does. This has nothing to do with how many recordings you already have. There are long threads about this problem about a year ago when the problem started. I returned two Maxtor 200GB drives myself.

Non-DB35 Seagate >=200GB drives are loud.
Pauli
11-27-2006, 08:44 PM
No offense, but I'm not sure if I'm buying it. It's a standard hard drive, otherwise there would be compatibility issues with PC's.

I'm going to try the upgrade again, just out of curiosity, without keeping my recordings. Spike's explanation makes sense. My old drive was completely full, and something with the filesystem and being expanded probably caused issues..

I'll be sure to post the results. Worst case I have a 200gb seagate I can swap with this one.
Buy it or not, this is a widely reported problem with Tivos. It's apparently caused by some firmware incompatibility with the Tivo's operating system, which is a Linux variant. Just because it works fine in a PC running Windows does NOT guarantee it will work in a Tivo. You should learn to trust real-world user experiences on this web site rather than your own instincts. To do so is foolish.
c3
11-27-2006, 10:02 PM
My guess is that if you try to capture/play back video with that drive under Windows, you may have problem as well, depending on the required transfer rate.