On / Off (standby) button

[Ckought]

I'd like to be able to have an On / Off button that would put the Tivo in standby mode -- still record shows that are scheduled to record, but otherwise shut down to conserve power.

It's cool that during normal use it continuously records the channel you're watching so that you can rewind live TV, but when I'm at work or in bed it's kind of a waste of power and hard drive use -- hard drives are resilient, but they do have a lifespan and do ware out.

[supasta]

Standby on a TiVo does not conserve any power...The HD still spins, it still records the buffer, it still can connect to get update and guide data, at it will still record programs.

From TiVo.com Support:

Standby Mode

Putting a TiVo DVR into Standby mode does the following:


# Stops sending video and audio from the DVR to the TV.

# Causes the lights on the front of the unit to go out.

# Re-enables Parental Controls if they have been temporarily disabled.

# Enters KidZone Now Playing screen upon return from standby (if KidZone is on).

# Programs that are being recorded or are scheduled to record will still be recorded (if a program is being recorded the red light will turn on.)

# If you used an RF coaxial cable to connect a program source to the DVR and to connect the DVR to the TV, Standby mode provides RF pass through. This means you can watch channels on your RF program source while the DVR is in Standby mode.

Note: You will not be able to control live TV (pause, rewind, etc.) while the DVR is in Standby mode.

Step one: To enter Standby mode, go to TiVo Central by pressing the TiVo button on your remote control. Select Messages & Settings, and then Standby.

Step two: To exit Standby mode, press either the TiVo button or the LIVE TV button.

[Ckought]

So, all that needs to be added to the list of what standby already does is to stop buffering the signal to the hard drive? Seems like that wouldn't be very difficult to do.

If they didn't want to set up a button on the remote for it, they could at least add it to the list of options on the top-level of menus (instead of buried down several levels in the messages & settings section).

[MikeMar]

Unless you want to be able to do the "pass through" of a signal, there is no reason to go into standby

[Ckought]

I'd like to save electricity and extend the lifespan of my hard drive.

The same reason TVs, AV receivers, computers, DVD players, VCRs, and pretty much every other electronic appliance in your home have an On / Off -- so you can turn it off when you're not using it.

I could write a program for my computer to continuously send random bytes to its hard drive 24-hours a day, but I don't think anyone in the industry would recommend it.

[MikeMar]

You will probably do more damage to the hard drive to spin it up then down every day.

Tons of people here have had their original or new hard drives running for like 5 years with no problems in their TiVo's, and it's easy enough to pop a new one in there after.

Especially if you can setup in standby w/ no buffer BUT records stuff, that will be a lot of spin up and down over the day for no reason.

[phox_mulder]

I'd like to be able to have an On / Off button that would put the Tivo in standby mode -- still record shows that are scheduled to record, but otherwise shut down to conserve power.

DirecTV TiVo's have this button, why can't standalone TiVo's have it.

Why have a "standby" mode if it doesn't do anything.

I'm a firm believer that it does indeed do something, and have put all my TiVo's into standby when I'm not using them since day one.

It doesn't seem to do anything on my two standalones,
but the two D*TiVos they seem quiter and there isn't a buffer when I wake them up.


phox

[Ckought]

There is NO WAY you can say that spinning a hard drive up and down is more damaging than constantly writhing data to it 24-hours a day.

If you figure that an hour's worth of recording takes about 1GB of data (and that's an extremely low estimate), that means that 24GB of data is being written to the hard drive's magnetic platters every day -- and depending on the size of the hard drive and how many shows you currently have recoded, it may be a relatively small area of free space on the drive that's being constantly written to and re-written to over and over. That's gotta put some hurtn' on the magnetic surface. And, since there's a lot of fragmentation, the constant motion of the head stack assembly (the main mechanical part of the drive) would cause it to ware out faster.

Also, if it's better for a hard drive to spin constantly rather than spin down when not in use, why is built into every modern computer's operating system? Even some hard drives automatically (hard-coded on their control board) spin-down after a set time if they're not accessed by the computer.

If it was 1987 I'd probably agree with you, due to thermal issues (caused by the drive heating up and cooling down over and over), but it's 2007 and manufacturers have redesigned their drives so that power cycling doesn't affect them nearly as much as it used to. Anymore, heat is more of an issue when the drive is constantly running and heat builds up in a system than when it has a chance to cycle down and cool off.

Anyway, back to the issue of having an On / Off mode . . . they could keep the Standby mode just the way it is now for people like yourself that want it that way, and also offer an On / Off mode that does the same as Standby but also stops buffering for people like myself that want it the other way. After all, it’s really just a computer without a keyboard or mouse . . . it can have as many different operating modes as the good people at Tivo want to program it to have.

[chip_r]

Possibly another reason for the lack of spin down is the Linux OS. These TiVo boxes are pretty light on memory and I suspect some disk swapping may be going on. I've tried to get small footprint Linux systems to spin down their hard drives to conserve power but it's a pain because of the number of active processes running in the box. Inevitably one or two processes hit the hard drive and wake it up again.

PCs can do this trick because most have lots of memory and it's a very desirable feature on laptops for power savings. TiVo just may not have an incentive to make the feature more useful in a non-portable system.

The whole hard drive discussion for disk life is really an old one. Electronics and mechanics in modern drives are tough and will take both the heat and power cycles. With the number of hard drives running in servers, PCs, DVRs, etc. in the world with very different usage patterns, you'd suspect that large-scale failures due to heat or power cycling would show up. They don't. Point is, the electronics will be near it's end of useful life by the time most drives fail.

I agree, the power and noise savings would be nice but there could be a real reason for the do-nothing standby mode.