Best 3TB drive for Roamio

I would recommend the WD Red, much quieter and use less power. There is also no settings to fuss with, WDIDLE, HDAT, etc.

I have a 4TB Red in mine.

The WD30EZRZ is not a AV drive.

 

I think the consensus here is that the WD Red's, not the Pro version, are the most used and recommended.

 

I was able to get the OEM:
Western Digital 3 TB WD AV-GP SATA III Intellipower 64 MB Cache Bulk/OEM AV Hard Drive WD30EURX
On Amazon for $135 The seller Oceanside store has really good reviews on Amazon and Ebay. I just didn't want to spend $135..... But in the end, I would rather spend a little more to have something that was designed for. I believe they no longer make the "green" series WD hard drives.

 

You could have got the WD30EFRX for $109 instead, also it has a better warranty (3yr vs. 2yr, I believe.)

 

Which one of these is the best option (not considering rates) -- looks like SATA II vs III

WD30PURX - WD AV-GP 3TB AV Video Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA II, 64 MB Cache
WD30EURX - Western Digital 3 TB WD AV-GP SATA III Intellipower 64 MB Cache

Or is the WD Red a superior option?

Thanks

 

I have two basic Roamio boxes. One with WD10EURX and one with WD30EURX. I detect no difference in reaction time. The 1TB dropped my MBT 3C, the 3TB raised my MBT 3C.

 

The WD Green (WD30EURX) used to be in favor, but is no longer being made, as I understand it; also, if I am recalling correctly, some potential issue developed later, per posts here?

The WD Red now seems to be the drive of choice, with a good warranty and at a sweet-spot pricewise for the 3TB (recently, around $110 at Amazon.com--had been a brief drop in late Nov. sales).

 

I have a base Roamio with lifetime that I purchased 9/2013, I stayed with the original 500GB drive until 8/2015 at which point I replaced it with a 3TB WD green drive. There was a noticeable improvement in performance when I installed the new drive (the 500GB drive was full) so there maybe something to performance degrading over time or because a drive becomes full. The 3TB is nearly full now but I mostly view content through my Bolt so it is hard for me to tell if the Roamio has degraded again or not.

 

I start getting nervous when any of my Roamios cross 80%, and 85% is my "download or delete" threshold. No facts to back that up, just a gut feeling. After 30 mumble years in IT a drive that's almost full just creeps me out.

 

Here's my method. I delete recordings after watching. In my Deleted Programs folder, I watch the end. I am now at the first week of October. Its a 1TB drive. When the last program gets erased, I delete the whole month. Then I proceed. I used to delete everything permanently. That was a bad idea since it caused all recording to be on or about the same area of the disk. I guess I spend too much time with my TiVo boxes.

 

I don't know where the bug is in TiVo (or maybe it was how I did the expansion on the S3 OLED) but I didn't have a problem with free space until I went on vacation and it became 100% full. I had my Season Passes set to keep until I delete. I would watch and delete and keep track of deleted folder to see when I was running out of space. This worked fine until the drive filled up, and now it seems the space for some shows I delete never gets reused. They just sit in the deleted folder and even though I have 10 shows sitting there and nothing scheduled to record, when I try to record something new, it says out of space. Over time I keep accumulating more of these shows that have been deleted but TiVo won't use the space for new recordings. If I permanently delete the shows from the Deleted folder, TiVo still says it is out of space, so it seems it just lost track of these shows and doesn't consider them free space anymore.

I have no idea what causes this situation, but I estimate I probably lost 10-15% of my 2TB drive capacity due to TiVo refusing to reuse empty space. I was thinking maybe this had to do with how the 2TB expansion was done by adding new partitions, but that is just a guess. I think that is how MFSR does the 8TB support also. What I describe might be totally unrelated to how the drive was expanded and maybe if I had set Keep until space needed the whole time I wouldn't have seen any issues.

 

Thanks! I see few of WD Red's with different descriptions!,
is this the one? -- WD30EFRX (WD Red 3TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB)
this one says Intellipower -- WD30EFRX (WD Red 3TB IntelliPower SATA3/SATA 6.0 GB/s 64MB)

 

Amazon sellers can give much different descriptions for the same products.
This one is the same item. Its not Intellipower that has issues on Tivo, but IntelliPark (Roamios are not affected.)

 

And it's the WD30EFRX that is the current "little darling."

 

I've had the WD30EURX in my Roamio since July 2015, plug and play install with zero issues in the past 18 months. It was $109 direct from Amazon at the time though.

I can't remember-- why not the WD30PURX at $99.98? It seems like a surveilance drive would be great in a DVR.

 

Thanks for posting--a great deal! Includes free shipping or store pickup; good through 1-21, subject to availability.