Drive Upgrade for 3 TIVOS

[kennington]

I hope there are some very knowldgeable people out there to help me with some infromation. I need to get standalone tivos upgrade.

I want to upgrade maybe 3 tivos but need some info. I have upgrade a HR10-250 and hr21 before so I have some experience with the method.

For the following 3 tivos:

TCD648250B - Series 3 Dual Tuner Series 3
TCD652160 - Dual Tuner
TCD649080 - Series 2 Dual Tuner


First question is what is the TCD652160 - Dual Tuner: Series 2 or 3? In fact, what is a series 2 verses 3 anyway?


Which of these units are less popular or that I should stay away from?


What type of hard drive do these use? Internal Sata or IDE? And any special brand needed?


Do I use the dvrupgrade tools for all of them of do we just plug in the drive and it formats it itself like on the HR21?


What is the most stable software version to use for these 3 units? I don't want to hope, I need solid. I see new problems being posted and want to stay away from that new version.


Is there any tricks I should be aware of with these specific units and upgrading to a larger hard drive?


How do I confirm the upgrade size and true success of the new hard drive install?


Does dvrupgrade have downloadable iso for each of these units? I don't see them all for some reason?

Thanks :)

[classicsat]

The Series 2 DT is a Series 2; IDE drive, analog input only. It requires a box for digital, and can only use one box. The "dual Tuner" feature needs analog cable to work. It will upgrade much like the HR10-250.

The 648 and 652 models are both considered Series 3. They both directly record digital/analog cable and/or digital/analog OTA, with no box needed for either (they cannot use STBs anyways), just Cablecards for digital cable. They are full analog/digital dual tuner (rather than an analog only DT of the Series 2 DT). They use SATA, and can have an eSATA drive added. You can find the box differences in the S3/TiVoHD forum, as well as an eSATA thread that will fill you in on what you need to know about eSATA expansion (there are rules and guidelines).
They cannot be used with satellite or IPTV services. I think they need to upgrade a bit differently than IDE based Tivos do.

You cannot decide what software to use, you get the current version pushed to you.