Hard Drives

As long as they are IDE drives, both would work just fine. Serial ATA drives are not compatible.

 

When looking for a harddrive for a TiVo, I would recommend finding one with some sort of acoustical management capabilities. Neither of those appear to have any.

 

Seagate is, to my knowledge, the only company with a 5-year warranty. That speaks volumes to me. They have a good reputation around here, so that would be my vote. I have several and they've done fine by me.

 

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The Western Digital does indeed support AAM. Seagate does not. WD is a good choice and you need to enable AAM through a third-party utility like WinAAM or Hitachi tool.

 

I have the Seagate drive you listed and it is LOUD! so LOUD that I moved it out of my bedroom.

 

Drive brands really don't matter much nowadays. I've used Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor, each seems to be basically the same. If it were me, I'd go with the WD because you'd get an additional 50gb of storage capacity.

If one of my Tivo's drives go dead, that's about the ideal capacity for the best price. 300gb drives are still over $100 for the most part.

 

I would go with that one. I wouldn't say that I'm a "die-hard" Seagate (who now owns Maxtor, by the way) fan, but the first Seagate drive I bought (for a home theater PC) was so quiet, I continued only buying Seagate drives, and they are all as quiet as my first one.

 

Samsung hard drives also support an acoustical management utility that you can enable 'quiet mode' on the drives.

 

I think the 5 year warranty is for the SCSI drives and not the IDE. Over the last couple of years Seagate, Maxtor, and WD have even scaled back the warranty for the IDE drives from three years to one. At least for OEM drives.

 

I used to love Seagate but the noise on the new drives is horrible. The head seeks are way too loud and there is no way to quiet the seeks. The WD can have the accoustic program ran to make it quiet.

I now only use Samsung drives from Newegg. Acoustic Managemnet is already enabled and they are very quiet. As far as warranty -- I do not care. The time it takes to reformat and replace is the biggest issue. I have 4 Tivo's and have averaged 2 yrs on drives with the exception of a Maxtor that lasted 2 days and a WD that lasted 3 months (both are fine in a PC but bad sectors are definitely an issue in a Tivo).

 

Seagate does indeed offer a 5 year warranty on IDE and SATA drives. THis applies to both retail and oem (at least the ones I have purchased). The Seagate on the Outpost special is fairly loud. It does not bother me at all because of the room it is in. Not sure if I could live with it in a small bedroom. I have purchased around 12 Seagates in the past couple years and they are all still working fine.

 

Hhhhmmm... interesting. I'm a partner (11 years) in an IT support company, the drives we purchase from distributors is OEM and a couple of years back WD, Maxtor, and Seagate scaled back the warranties. I of course could have been mistaken earlier. Now my curiosity is going. I even remember reading in IT trade rags about folks not being happy with the decision to scale back the warranty from 3 to 1 year. I'll have to check into that again.

 

Last Friday, I purchased a 160GB Seagate for my new DVR4ME DSR-7000. ($40 after rebates.) The box says "Five Year Warranty" on both sides.

I agree with Dkerr24 that there is little difference between the various drive manufacturers. Where possible, I go with Seagate, just for the warranty.

 

If I need a HDD I just take one off of our shelve in our shop. I don't pay much attention to the retail stuff at the brick and mortars.

Here's a link to Westerndigital.

http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp

I guess we're all right to some degree.

 

outpost.com has a Seagate 300GB drive(7200.8 version) on sale for $129.99 with a $50 rebate making the final cost for the drive only $79.99 which for $10 more and 100GB more than the 200GB for $69.99

 

I have a 300gig Maxtor in one of my units and the thing seems to knock louder than my car after I turn the ignition off. I do have other smaller Maxtor's which are fine (40gig units). I guess it could be just a somewhat defective drive, but it still works.

 

I'm pretty sure there was a while where you could get the 'standard' drive with a 1 year warrany, or the 'premium' drive with a 3 or 5 year warranty. Do the drive manufacturers still do this? If I remember correctly, they sold essentially the same drive under two different part numbers, charging more for the longer warranty.

 

I wrote Seagate off many years ago, but it sounds like it might be a good idea to use them again.