How long will S3 last?

What kind of antenna are you using?

 

My original S1 that I got in 2000 is still running up at a friends house with a replacement drive 10 years later, I have no reason think that S3's won't have an equally long life.

 

Consumer electronics will last as long as they will last. In other words, it's anyone's guess how long your Tivo will survive. Replacing the hard drive every few years is probably good preventative maintenance but there's nothing that says the replacement won't die in short order either.

I've got a pair of Kenwood L-07M monoblock power amps in my surround system that I bought new back in 1978 and they're still going strong. I've seen a lot of them that have also died in that same time span. There's no 100% guarantee that every single component inside of a piece of electronics is exactly the same as the rest of the ones made in that same plant. Electronic components all fail at different rates and some may last nearly forever.

The quality and stability of the electric service that feeds your home plays a major part in the longevity of each electrical device in your home. Using a line conditioner or UPS with surge protection, voltage regulation, and line filtering is probably the best thing you can do for it. Having just a battery backup on a Tivo is otherwise pretty useless unless the UPS can provide some other form of protection.

With Tivos, the hard drive is the one component you can almost guarantee will fail at some point. If you're lucky, the rest of the hardware will endure for quite some time. If you're looking for some sort of insurance that your Tivo will last forever, it just isn't possible to predict.

I've owned literally dozens of various Tivo models over the years and never had a hardware failure in any of them with the exception of the infamous HDMI card issue in the HR10-250 models and only one or two hard drive failures in the rest. Perhaps I've been extremely lucky compared to others, but every Tivo I've ever owned has been very reliable and long lasting.

 

In most cases TiVos in general don't have many hardware problems except for the Hard Drives. Sounds like you already know how to put in a new one, so IMO it will probably last as long as you want it to. Just keep a backup of your software and SP's like I did. You can replace the HDD if necessary quite easily.

By the time six years has passed you will undoubtedly be ready for the new software and hardware that will be around then. For now? I see no reason to give up my beloved S3.

 

Some people are still using the Series 1 that's over 10 years old, if you just want to record SDTV, time shift TV, and skip ads the Series 1 still works, the Series 3 introduced HDTV and I don't think that that standard is going to change over the next 20 years (the last US TV standard lasted over 60 years), so if all you need is to record HDTV, time shift TV, and skip ads, by just changing drives the Series 3 could last many years. New software/new TiVo models may or may not offer anything you need. Some on this form must spend a lot of time using the UI because they want the total UI to be in HD, I spend most of my TiVo time watching what I recorded and just want the UI to get me to my program quickly, don't care if getting there is in HD or SD.

 

I can't tell from your reply what your reason was for going to the omni antenna. Were you having the signal drop problems with the directional antenna, or just with the omni?
Based on the signal drop I would guess some kind of multipath interference, which one would think the directional antenna would minimize.

 

Last I checked there is a deficiency of the OTA tuners in the Premiere relative to the S3 or HD models -- an argument for staying with what you have, assuming OTA continues to be of interest. There is at least one thread in the Premiere forum on this.