Which Samsung HD?

[Andy_B]

Hi I am in the process of upgrading my TIVO. I've trawled the threads and it seems Samsung is top dog as a replacement hard drive.
My question Which drive is best and why? -
......the more current AV hard drives drives purchasable from CCL amongst others in 250 and 300 flavours (around £40-£57) or the seemingly older but much more expensive HA250JC drive from Ultratec (£82)

anyone care to explain and advise :confused:

[Pete77]

The Ultratec HA250JC Samsung runs at 5400rpm and is a dedicated PVR specific drive that they stopped making 18months ago. blindlemon ( www.tivoheaven.co.uk ) claims they run quieter and cooler than any other 3.5" hard drives he knows of. I have 2 HA250JC drives fitted in my Tivo in June 2005 and they are very quiet but I don't have any other recent Samsung drives to compare them with back to back. They are now expensive purely because they are old stock and reflect the price for a 250Gb drive 20 months ago.

The Samsung HD LD (T Series) 300Gb and 400Gb drives run at 7200 rpm and in theory may run a little warmer and noisier than the HA250JC, except that current 400Gb drives at 7200rpm are almost as quiet as 250Gb drives running at 5400rpm 20 months ago were.

blindlemon is a perfectionist but loads of people off here have now fitted the current T series (HDLD) 300Gb and 400Gb Samsung drives and are very happy with them and all say they are very quiet. They also have a 3 year guarantee that you don't get with Maxtor (unless terms have changed since Seagate bought them), Hitachi or Westerm Digital. Seagate drives are also nearly as quiet as Samsung (which are much quieter than Hitachi, Maxtor or Western Digital 3.5" drives) and have a 5 year warranty but their latest 300Gb and 400Gb drives draw so much power that you can't then later fit a second one in your Tivo alongside the first one. If you do it will stop working. You can fit two large Samsung HDLD 300Gb and 400Gb drives in a Tivo without any issues.

In my view the HA250JC drive from Ultratec (if they actually have any in stock when you press order on their website) isn't worth it these days but blindlemon may beg to disagree with me.

[Andy_B]

Thanks pete77 for the explanation.
I think for the money I would be better of getting one of the newer cheaper Samsung AV drives if the general consensus is they are reliable and quiet and using the money saved from a possible HA250JC purchase to upgrade to a Cachecard etc ;)

[Pete77]

Thanks pete77 for the explanation.
I think for the money I would be better of getting one of the newer cheaper Samsung AV drives if the general consensus is they are reliable and quiet and using the money saved from a possible HA250JC purchase to upgrade to a Cachecard etc ;)

I think you would really be just as well off with one of the T series 300Gb and 400Gb Samsung drives and also getting a Cachecard. Once you have a Cachecard and Tivoweb there are then so many other things you can do with your Tivo that you couldn't do before.

As long as you can do the install yourself using the instructions at www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo then the saving compared to buying the same drive from one of the professional Tivoweb preconfigured drive sellers is such that you will have most of the money for a Cachecard and 512MB of RAM, depending where you buy your Cachecard from. ;)

[blindlemon]

Seagate drives are also nearly as quiet as Samsung [...] but their latest 300Gb and 400Gb drives draw so much power that you can't then later fit a second one in your Tivo alongside the first one. This applies to ALL 7200.9 and 72001.10 series Seagate drives from 160gb up, plus the so-called 'low-current' DB35 series. They also seem to aggravate the helium sound bug (http://www.garysargent.co.uk/tivo/bugs/wizard/audio/warble.htm), so if your TiVo is prone to that, then you will have problems :down:
In my view the HA250JC drive from Ultratec isn't worth it these days but blindlemon may beg to disagree with me.I do. If you want the quietest drive around, bar none, then the HA250JC is the drive to go for.

The larger T133 series are also very quiet in terms of seek noise, but like all 7200rpm drives they can sometimes hum a bit in a TiVo due to rotational vibration. The HA250JC has the lowest vibration of any 3.5" drive over 40gb I have handled - so much so in fact that I often have to double-check that I attached the power lead when I'm testing them as the really good ones can feel like they're not switched on!

They are also the most reliable drive I've ever sold for TiVo use, with a failure rate of less than 1% in the nearly 2 years I've been supplying them :up:

[Pete77]

They are also the most reliable drive I've ever sold for TiVo use, with a failure rate of less than 1% in the nearly 2 years I've been supplying them :up:

That is a more compelling argument than the extra quietness one but as we know from the Google stats most hard drives don't fail in their first two years. The more interesting statistic will be what rate of hard drive failure these drives actually turn out to have after 3, 4 and 5 years.

Also do Ultratec actually have any more HA250JCs in stock now as they had run out of them a while ago.

[blindlemon]

as we know from the Google stats most hard drives don't fail in their first two years.Google's drives might not, but they're not used in a TiVo :)

There is a small percentage of all drives that fail in the first couple of months of TiVo use regardless of the amount of pre-testing you do on them; after that, if they last a year they normally last 2 or 3 easily. The failures I'm talking about are those within my 1 year warranty period (or just out of it), including the early duds, and for the HA250JC these have been by far the lowest in percentage terms of all the drive models I've supplied.
Also do Ultratec actually have any more HA250JCs in stock now as they had run out of them a while ago.136 according to their website, which is normally accurate.

[Pete77]

136 according to their website, which is normally accurate.
Where do you think Ultratec are getting them from as no one else has them? A special import direct from Korea perhaps?

Any thoughts as to why Samsung haven't come up with an IDE variant of their 500Gb drives yet?

[Pete77]

Google's drives might not, but they're not used in a TiVo :
And annoyingly Google failed to break down their reliability stats by hard drive manufacturer.

Of course perhaps they were paid not to break them down further by Hitachi and/or the Maxtor hard drive division of Seagate? ;)

[blindlemon]

Where do you think Ultratec are getting them from as no one else has them?I suspect nobody else has them because they are effectively now a specialist item. Dabs, eBuyer, Komplett etc. will look at the price compared to other 250gb drives and decide that nobody will buy them! As for source, they are all old stock from somewhere...
Any thoughts as to why Samsung haven't come up with an IDE variant of their 500Gb drives yet?They probably did some market research that showed that most people buying large drives have SATA equipped PCs. And 500gb is large, even for a PVR, so the demand there - particularly from OEMs - would be very small. Even the HD Series 3 TiVo only ships with a 250gb drive - and that's SATA too.

[Pete77]

They probably did some market research that showed that most people buying large drives have SATA equipped PCs. And 500gb is large, even for a PVR, so the demand there - particularly from OEMs - would be very small. Even the HD Series 3 TiVo only ships with a 250gb drive - and that's SATA.
So as 500Gb become more commonplace and volumes increase then in due course they will probably come out with a 500Gb variant?

Mind you the promised Hitachi 1TB drive has still not been released yet (even in the USA), despite being slated for late 2006 when they originally mentioned it.

[blindlemon]

FWIW, people have had success using an IDE-SATA converter in Series 2 TiVos. This one (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812206001) apparently works, and seems very similar in terms of appearance and spec to this (https://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/106547) from eBuyer - so if you're itching to try a 500gb Samsung drive in your TiVo, why not give it a go :)

[Pete77]

FWIW, people have had success using an IDE-SATA converter in Series 2 TiVos. This one (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812206001) apparently works, and seems very similar in terms of appearance and spec to this (https://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/106547) from eBuyer - so if you're itching to try a 500gb Samsung drive in your TiVo, why not give it a go :)
I won't be doing that any time soon though, barring unexpexted hard drive failures, as I now realise what a uniquely good choice I made with my Samsung HA250JCs as they were actually £10 or so each cheaper than the current selling price nearly 2 years ago now.

Having my old Quantum 30Gb + 15Gb drives running back in the duff Tivo has made me realise how nice it is to have a Tivo with fast menu operations again. Even if the Quantums are unbelievably noisy when they are doing an indexing or garbage clearance operation, although actually fairly quiet when just doing the live tv buffer.

So what I must do is to start deleting the many recordings from over 2 years I will never ever find time to watch and start recording most stuff in Mode 0. A couple of hundred hours or so recording time (depending what 4600000/9000000 actually gives you in practice with 500Gb as I don't like seeing white flashes and iankb finds these settings avoid white flashes) really ought to be enough for anyone.

[AMc]

And annoyingly Google failed to break down their reliability stats by hard drive manufacturer.

Of course perhaps they were paid not to break them down further by Hitachi and/or the Maxtor hard drive division of Seagate?
Having read that article, I suspect that Google didn't mention the manufacturers as they would open themselves to wholesale misquoting and potentially law suits from the manufacturers.
Even Google won't have bought large enough quanities of a range of drives from a single manufacturer to make a representative sample to definitively state brand X is more reliable than brand Y. And the drives they were talking about will have been in the remainder bins for 3 years anyway - past performance not being an indicator of future reliability etc.

There are probably commercial advantages to suspecting who's drives are likely to last longest which Google won't want to reveal as it would affect the purchase price they'd pay.