Less than 3 months, Bolt Dead

Have had my Bolt for a year-and-a-half, now, and no issues (knock wood). For whatever it's worth, as you've seen, TiVo seems to have a more liberal replacement policy (gallows humor).

If you want to go the Roamio route, note that TiVo should be offering a refurb. Roamio 1TB OTA, with included Lifetime subscription, for $299, as part of its on-going Winterfest sale, starting tomorrow. (And if you're a cable person and don't mind a modest hack, a cablecard adapter can be purchased and be added to it, fairly easily--there is a thread here on the topic.) I purchased a refurb. Roamio OTA from TiVo a bunch of years ago and have had no issue with it--it felt like it was new out of the box (no scratches or mars/all the feet there/etc.).
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Laugh all you want, but they were not wrong, moving to a different power source and/or removing it from a power strip is considered a standard item in most support scripts for products.

 

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I would suggest you have a backup TiVo if you go with the Bolt again. My first Bolt + lasted 16 months. Hard drive died. TiVo replaced it out-of-warranty for $50.00. I still have a TiVo HD and a TiVo Premiere which have operated flawlessly for many years. One of these duplicated the One-Pass recordings from my Bolt +. Glad I did this as I lost about 200 hours of recorded programming on the Bolt. Loosing everything you've recorded can be very frustrating.

When a DVR with the great UI, flexibility and recording hours TiVo has allows me to save my recorded programming to the cloud in case of equipment failure, I'll be jumping ship in a heartbeat. Or maybe TiVo will add this capability, at additional cost, in the future.

 

One drive going bad does not make a box junk. Your sample size is a little too small, and interpolating data from a forum samplimg is also silly, and clearly very biased. Hard drives go bad. Sucks, but they are easily replaced. I have it on good authority tivo does not manufacture the drives themselves.

 

Their has been a lot of posts of Bolt problems needing replacement.

 

True. I've never seen the multitude of complaints for previous models. Pretty clear that the drives are not as robust as the old 3.5 inch drives. Not sure if it's the drives or the heat. I've taken steps to reduce the heat in hopes that will extend the drive life.

 

My roamio has been going strong for over 6 years (gave it to mom). My first bolt died after 13 months. They put crappy hard drives in the bolts and not enough cooling. I added a fan below my replacement to help.

 

It really is sad that the Bolt doesn’t meet the standards of the former TiVos as far as build quality. I also added some external cooling as a precaution hoping that it will prevent future problems. In my opinion the bolt’s hardware is very responsive and very much improved but it leaves a lot to be desired as far as design.

 

My Bolt has been running fine for over 2 yrs. I went through 3 Roamios in 4 yrs although the last one is still running fine. Each had a tuner fail.

 

On my third Bolt in less than a year. I feel ripped off. Tivo used to be great but now they simply suck. Their hardware is flaky and prone to overheating. Their software is flaky, the UI is a cluster and their "technical support" is neither technical or supportive.

 

With no data to back this up, I have always felt when I did notebook repair that the 2.5" drives were much more delicate than the 3.5".
I had also liked the shock mounting (the rubber isolation discs) with the larger drives that are not used with the smaller drives.

 

Our Tivo Bolt with a 2Gb drive I put in has been running since we got it in 2015 when they were released. We are OTA only and no cable card. It has been on a laptop cooling pad for the past year with OTD of 52 even when the Mini is streaming from it.

I can't comment about the Roamio as I never had one.