All flashing lights, change hard drive? What else can I try?

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Hello.

When I purchased my used Tivo bolt, it had all flashing lights and was told by the seller it was a simple hard drive failure.

I replaced the hard drive with a normal size 3.5 inch 8TB hard drive vs the laptop hard drive that was there before.

I followed whatever steps you are suppose to do and it sort of works.

The problem is that even so often all the lights start flashing again and it requires me to just reset the device for it to start working again.

Sometimes it has gone as long as a 2 weeks on its own and sometimes its a little as 1 hour.

Eventually the lights will all start flashing again.

Does this sound like maybe a bad SATA cable or firmware on the device itself?

It sort of works but has become very flaky from day 1. Perhaps the ebay seller was trying to sell a lemon of a tivo.

Please let me know if there are any troubleshooting steps I can take to try to pinpoint the problem?

Thanks.

 

What steps do you have for me to follow?

 

How can I tell if I'm using the hail Hydra or classic OS ?

I swapped out the hard drives about 13 months ago if that helps.

Its connected directly into the SATA

The hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda ST8000DM004

As far as I know, the " archive drives" are the SMD style.

 

I don't recall ever seeing a ad on my TIVO before which may support this theory especially if other have experienced this pre-roll ad crash.

TIVO will turn these off on request but only via phone call? I tried to contact them but they are closed for the day. Hopefully they will be open tomorrow on New years eve and not all drunk.

Thanks.

 

Its the Classic (TE3) then from the pictures you showed me.

 

On the amazon question/answers, someone wrote ' Seagate does make 8Tb SMR disks (ST8000AS0003)" this one however is the ST8000DM004 not the ST8000DM003.

How do you know the ST8000DM004 is an SMR drive? It said barracuda on it not archive. Where do you see that its an SMR drive? Normally from my understanding
I do see someone in the UK on Amazon negative review claiming this is an unlabeled SMR drive. Is that what you are referring to? Generally speaking the archive = SMR drive not barracuda. Would Seagate sell an SMR drive and refuse to publish those specs to cover it up?



* UPDATE: Its a conspiracy. Seagate took the SMR archive drives and labeled them as a Barracuda drive to fool people and did not publish the specs. This should be criminal. I hope there is a good class action lawyer who understands exactly what seagate did here with the inferior SMR archive drives being labeled as a Barracuda drive and hiding the specs. I even downloaded the large PDF manual on the drive and it does not say SMR on it anywhere.

 

My mistake. SMD=SMR

My mistake:

I said SMD but I mean SMR. I was referring to shingled magnetic disk but its shingled magnetic recording.

SMR have always been the archive drive because that is what they were design to do. Lets say there was some TV series you got from TIVO with TIVO desktop or something. Something you may want to revisit one day but not actively looking at. You may want to put that in an Archive(SMR) drive which for 99.999% of the time will not be viewed or changed once written.

Hence the name archive drive to archive the information but not used as a traditional hard drive.

The process that this drives writes information involves a very intensive process including basically deleting previous information, committing it to a temporary memory and rewriting it every time it has to write something new. Making it horrible if you are compactly writing new things to it.

If I understand it correctly, its not the reading that stresses the drive, its the writing. So having this drive inside a TIVO is the absolutely worst possible thing you can do.

However I would like everyone to know that its not right what Seagate has done here. They have taken an archive drive which is design for archiving things and labeled it a Barracuda drive design for performance.

Then they covered up this information by omitting this SMR information from the box, spec sheet and even the manual.

AFTER they were called out for it on various websites, articles, forums, etc... They published a new correction saying like " Oh yeah, those drives you thought were Barracuda are actually basically archive SMR drives, please don't sue us"

This is a very sad day and a disgrace for Seagate in my humble opinion.

 

I am going to have to hunt down a 8TB hard drive which is not SMR.

By the way, these hard drive manufacturers almost seem like they are going out of their way to hide if a Hard drive is SMR.

Its almost like they are ashamed of this and trying their best to hide this information.

Kind of like a restaurant owner hiring ex-felons to work in the kitchen.

They don't want their customers to realize the lemonade they are drinking was made by a convicted criminal.