Alot of Hard drive access.

[tssbboy]

I recently Zipper'd my SD-DVR40. I took out the 40gig WD drive, and installed a brand new 160gig WD drive (WD1600JB). I've noticed that this drive is ALOT louder than the old one.. I can hear it from across the room when nothing is on.

that being the case i've noticed since the updgrade that the hard drive is being accessed ALOT. I can hear long periods of the drive chugging along.. when nothing is being recorded. any thoughts?

[mr.unnatural]

Something is always being recorded. Keep in mind that the DTivo buffers the last 30 minutes of the channel its currently tuned to and with dual tuners it's constantly recording both channels. The only way to get around this is to tune to blank channels and it will stop buffering. If the noise bothers you then you might consider installing some sound damping material inside the case to muffle the sound. Do a search for quietPC and see what you come up with. There is a material that comes in self-stick sheets that many HTPC builders use to reduce the noise coming out of their HTPCs, but the name of the product escapes me at the moment.

[tssbboy]

Something is always being recorded. Keep in mind that the DTivo buffers the last 30 minutes of the channel its currently tuned to and with dual tuners it's constantly recording both channels. The only way to get around this is to tune to blank channels and it will stop buffering. If the noise bothers you then you might consider installing some sound damping material inside the case to muffle the sound. Do a search for quietPC and see what you come up with. There is a material that comes in self-stick sheets that many HTPC builders use to reduce the noise coming out of their HTPCs, but the name of the product escapes me at the moment.


Yep,
only thing is, its a different sound then when your recording.. I Can hear when its recording, and it really doesnt make much noise at all. But its different, as if the machine is searching, or doing intense work.

[puffdaddy]

Different drives sound different. Your original WD may be a 5400 rpm and/or may have come with AAM set.

Set AAM on your new drive (which should reduce seek chatter) with the Hitachi Feature Tool.

[tssbboy]

I'm gonna try setting AAM Tonight. Thanks for the TIP.

I still think its abnormal though. The access doesnt seem to be coming from the recordings. It seems like some kind of maintenence thing. I have two things being recorded right now, and it makes LESS noise then when its doing the heavy read/writing and not "recording" anything. When its recording it makes a "tick" mabe once or twice a second.

The noise its making is a from litterally CONSTANT read/writing.. as if someone was speed testing the drive or something...

I also notice after its done "chugging" the record light comes on for about 5 min and then goes off.


i'm going to check what proccesses are running when its chugging and when its not chugging and see if theres a difference. I want to figure out what is using the drive so much.

[TK2006]

I recently zippered a SD-DVR80 and installed a new 300GB Seagate. I have been experiencing the exact phenomenon ever since. I still haven't found the culprit but continue looking. It happens for me very regularly around 10:00PM CST. I checked recently during the high I/O and couldn't see anything running. I'm stumped, so please post if you find anything.

[tssbboy]

I've also noticed that on Tivo Web Plus, there are items in my to do list like this one
Fri 12/8 2:00 am TIVOR TiVo Service Data No Episode Title (12/7/2006) Broadcast of data to keep your TiVo Service up to date.

which are listed almost every hour or half hour. everyday from 2-5am

[TK2006]

I just checked my to do list in TWP and don't have anything like that. Sounds like a good canidate though

[TK2006]

I tried to capture what was running the last time by HD went nuts. I saw something running named "dbgc-mcp". I'm not sure what this does or if it's needed. I have also found some posts about Seagate HD's running loudly. That might be my problem, but if you're running a WD drive then I don't know.

[Grentz]

if you have a zippered tivo it could be when it runs the Backup Scripts (for seaons passes). I noticed that when the backup script runs it makes a lot of chatter.

But who knows, i am a noobie to this stuff :p

[TK2006]

That makes sense actually. I have been doing some more investigating, and noticed my "tvlog" file located in /var/log is 16 MB. It is about 500 lines of meaningful logs, and then 147,000 lines of garbage. And that is just from one day!

Does anyone know how to turn logging off? I'm really not going to be going through the logs, so there is no need for me to have all this information.

Thanks for the help

[cyrusthevirus72]

i've been experiencing the same kind of thing ever since the upgrade - i just have a dual tuner series 2 - but it ran without any sound for the most part for the first month and a half I owned the machine - then the upgrade came and all of a sudden it sounds like the hard drive is constantly searching for something. I don't know what the deal is. Any further thoughts?

[TK2006]

Well it's not writing to the tvlog file. I decided to get around that problem by adding to the cron and deleting that file daily. If the file does not exist, it doesn't get written to. When the system reboots though, the file get re-created. So I just added the daily cron job to make sure. I still haven't found out what is getting written to disk making all the chatter. It happens for me regularly between 9:30PM and 10:30PM CST, and then throughout the night also. Very annoying...