What do you do to your TiVo when you're done watching?

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Yeah, TiVo really should look into providing users the option to turn that off in the next release.

Oh wait....

 

Hard drives are like light bulbs.
Did you know that a light bulb that is left on continuously will last longer than one that is turned on and off?

 

I never turn off my computers either, and have had very few drive failures in my 26 years of experience.

 

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so you are saying the google engineers and admins that collected the data on performance of hundreds of thousands of hard drives and then analyzed the data for impactful business reasons are wrong?

What would make you right then?

 

Because the majority of hard drive failures happen during the spin-up/spin-down process when starting and stopping. The more stopping and starting you do, the greater the chance the drive will fail.

 

Truthiness.

 

Yes you can. If the act of spinning up dramatically increases the fpmh (failures per million hours) of the hard drive. The spin-up act takes a lot of energy and power (relatively speaking) and places additional stress on the rotational motor.

On the other hand, the act of the heads constantly moving back and forth places wear and tear on that separate motor. So if that motor has the highest fpmh, you may be better off letting the hard drive sleep. Also, you are making the gigantic assumption that the fpmh value is a result of use and not aging.

As it turns out, the fpmh of both mechanisms is statistically the same and really low. It may vary slight from model to model, but there is no noticeable difference.

 

I have been doing just what you described with pause. May I ask where you learned about this? (If it's common knowledge, I'll feel stupid but at least I'll know that.)

One other thing I've done before bedtime on nights when nothing else is scheduled to be recorded was to change channels on both tuners to channels which do not have a signal, like the Comcast On-Demand channels that I don't receive on TiVo HD. I was thinking that the unit won't constantly buffer live TV that way with no signal present. But then again I may be feeling stupid, depending on what others may advise here.

 

I recently found out that the hard drives still spin but just do not do any read or writes. So it saves some movemnet on the heads but not on Watts used by TiVo. Since the Google study I have not worried so much about whether a hard drive is doing work or not anymore from a longevity standpoint.


Now it has been show that going to two blank channels and thus stopping the read writes does speed up MRV or TTG/CB since they get all the hard drives and CPUs time nad bandwidth without sharing.

but as far as being concerned about the drive constantly working from a longevity perspective - no need to worry.

from a power use perspective - it is a 30 watt bulb equivalent and frankly that to me is not enough juice saved to offset the resources needed to add a true hard drive power down mode and too much chance of a glitch of the Tivo not waking up and thus missing recordings.

 

I really appreciate your response which has enlightened me significantly! Do you know if "parking" TiVo by pausing a program playing in the Now Playing list is possibly harmful to the hard drive as the other poster commented (per quotation in my first post on this thread)? Thanks for taking the time to help!

 

I don't see how it would make any difference. It's not as if the read/write heads just sit on that one spot, live tv is still being recorded to the buffer.

 

The number of programs anyone chooses to record is irrelevant to the hard drive life span. The Tivo is always recording something.

 

I agree with Scandia that it has no effect.

The TiVo will keep on recording something despite the pause of the one show and thus the drive heads have to keep moving.

I do not know how the pause works but I highly doubt they would keep reading from the hard drive anyway. They already have the data needed to display the image for the pause and the index to where to go next when play is resumed. If I designed that piece of the system, my strong inclination would be to refresh the image from memory versus the hard drive.

read write operations on the TiVo are probably only used when needed as there are two real time streams of importance to capture to the drive all the time and perhaps a 3rd one being read and played back

 

Thanks to Scandia101 and ZeoTiVo! I was skeptical that using pause to "park" TiVo would be risky. I also wondered if the combination of pausing a recorded show and tuning both tuners to channels with no signal would effectively reduce read/write activity but it sounds like it would not.

 

You also need to remember that the TiVo comes with a drive that is designed to run 24/7. Not that a regular hard drive can't run 24/7, but the TiVo's drive was designed for that very purpose.

 

I'll be unplugging my Tivo at some point tonight, I'll only risk the Comcrap DVR.

 

you still have it backwards
pausing has no impact on read writes save for reading the next part to display. going to the TiVo main menu is just as effective and perhaps needs less memory to keep the main menu image displaying. After some time it will go back to live TV but if it isa channel with no signal then it is just a black screen.

tuning both tuners to channels that have no signal will stop the read and writes to the hard drive as no live buffer will be written. that frees them up to faster serve up copies of shows from that TiVo to other TiVo DVRs .

no matter the conditions the drives keep spinning while the Tivo DVR has power - so no significant power useage drop no matter what.

 

this reminds me of that goofy old virus warning that went out about a virus that would cause the CPU to do so many calculations it would overheat to the point of catching on fire thus destroying your PC.

 

I now understand that pause has no effect but more importantly causes no risk either as the other poster suggested. That was my main concern.

You have also helped me understand that, as far as read/write activity goes, tuning to channels with no signals may have some benefits but unfortunately no power savings. My old ReplayTV hard drive would spin down when not busy with a task... something I wish TiVo would incorporate in its design.

Thanks again, ZeoTiVo!