What is Best Replacement Drive for HR10-250

The Maxtor QuickView drives are specially designed for DVR applications. Weaknees sells them, both blank and pre-formatted for your Tivo. Seagate drives also tend to get high marks from folks here.

 

Which means, as near as I can tell, that they are more expensive. I can't imagine how they could possibly be better than a typical hard drive...

 

Marketing works.

I don't think there is any test that shows Quickview drive is any better. The Quickview drive in my first Tivo died in 6 months.

 

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I have two units running dual Seagate 300 GB drives, one for 12 months, and the other for 18 months.

I bought them specifically for the 5-year warranty, but I also noticed that the power consumption figures noted on the drives is about 60% of what is shown on the WD drives. I don't know if these are accurate, but the power supply doesn't have any problem starting both drives together, and the internal operating temperature is similar to the original single-drive system.

 

And, as always, the Seagates do not have acoustical noise settings. So if it is in your bedroom, you will hear your Tivo at night.

I have a 300 GB in my bedroom, it ticks when silent, but my wife always has a fan running (Before we ever got Tivo) and it masks it completely.

Sensitive to noise, get the Maxtor.

 

I picked up two 500 gig Seagates at Outpost.com for $137 after rebate. I got the Seagates because of the 5 year warrenty. I now have space for 130 hours of HD programs and/or more than 800 hours of lowdef programming. They aren't on sale right now, but I saw the 400 gig Seagates for $109.

They run quietly and though I don't know if the drives are any better, they have the best warrany I've seen. I upgrade and repair Tivos for people in the Minneapolis area and have seen a lot of Western Digital and Maxtor drive fail in Tivo receivers.

 

I have a 250 GB Quickview in my SV-2000 and I'm very happy with it. Maxtor says they design it to be less finicky than a HD meant to be used in a computer, where any data loss no matter how minor would be bad. Since such minor data loss in a DVR doesn't affect picture quality, it doesn't try to go back and retrieve it, making for better playback. I wish I had put one in my Hughes, it has a regular Maxtor 250 GB and is much less smooth, often pausing when using the 30 sec skip and the ff and rewind, as well as occasional "stutter", the SV-2000 never does any of that.

 

I have used Seagate 400 Gig with 16 meg cache with great results on 7 or 8 SD and HD units. I got most from outpost for $109. I will eventually get a 750 Seagate when the price is $250 or less.
Hope this helps,
BigBearf

 

FWIW, I bought 6 Quickviews (120mb) a couple of years ago for my various Tivos. 3 or 4 died within a year. I have since switched to Seagate (250 and 300 mb) and have been very happy with them.

 

Tune your tuner(s) to non-existent channels (or music channels) before you go to bed and you'll hear practically nothing.

 

Maybe not "better" as is typically thought of for HDDs, but "better" as in more well-suited to the task at hand.

A computer hard drive is typically considered "better" if it has more burst throughput than another drive. That makes it "faster" for the kinds of short, intense tasks that computers do. Sustained throughput is not a priority, as a pause for Tcal or whatever every once in a while is well-tolerated for computer tasks.

A PVR drive needs better sustained throughput, because the tasks in a PVR can't afford interruptions. Streaming recording is quite a different task than crunching a spreadsheet or accessing a web page. Burst throughput is not a priority, because even at 4400 or 5400 RPM, all of the tasks that a PVR might do, even simultaneously, are significantly below the threshold of any ability to burst data, even on a "slow" drive. IOW, better burst performance doesn't help here.

IOW, even "slow" drives can do everything inside a PVR that is needed, as long as they can do it continuosly. That makes a "faster" drive (good burst throughput but poor sustained throughput) not as good as a slower multimedia drive (mediocre burst throughput but good sustained throughput) for a PVR. Slower RPM drives also generate a lot less heat.

The Maxtor QV's are designed for streaming multimedia, do not pause for Tcal, and have large buffers, again, all to provide good sustained throughput. But whatever the reason, I think it makes sense to use the drives that the third-party vendors such as Weaknees have proven will do the job the best, and it probably doesn't make as much sense to try this weekend's bargain drive from CompUSA.

 

I'm also interested in replacing my HR10-250 HD.
Do I have to get a ATA-133 drive, or does the HR10-250 have SATA ?

 

The HR10-250 has PATA. It does not have to be a ATA-133, ATA-100 drives work just fine.

 

I just ordered the 40 hour HD add-a-drive upgrade from Weaknees, 300gb Seagate DB35 drive.
I'm computer literate, but didn't want to take a chance on messing something up,
so Weaknees seemed the right option.

Hope it works.

After seeing the fall schedule, and the S3 not materializing yet, I had to do something so I can see as much as possible in HD.
Couple of nights I'll have to resort to watching something in SD due to 3+ programs at the same time,
but at least I won't be running out of space as quickly as I did at the end of last season.


phox

 

Would 10,000 RPM drives make much difference (Provided you could do something about the heat)? What about drives with 16MB Cache?

 

The way the TiVo works on the IDE bus using a faster drive or one with a large cache will only give you a very minimal improvement if any.

 

You won't get any improvement with >5400 RPM, and in fact I'd argue a faster drive is worse since it likely runs hotter.

 

Sounds like you need to setup extraction on your TiVo so that you can archive them off and watch them later Don't have to worry about it filling up then.

I am about a year behind on some of my shows, but still have them all to watch.

 

I have IBM, Western Digital, and Maxtor in 2 different TiVo's. I don't know what is in my HR10-250, though. The drives I mentioned have all been working flawlessly for over 4 years. Probably doesn't prove much, but I sell office automation, and we service all the computers we sell. We have everything including 15,000 RPM SCSI RAID arrays, to the lowliest cheap drives. We don't see very many drives fail at all. Most drives last well over 5 years, and these typically never shut down.

Personally, I prefer Hinsdale's InstantCake approach to upgrading TiVo's (or replacing a failed drive.) He includes a very effective disk cache for speeding up the TiVo interface. You can get the software and download it for $19.95 online.

It is very simple to use, but does require a complete "Clear & Delete Everything" to complete your installation. It can be used for both single and dual drive systems, and is available for the HR10-250. I have no issues with the drive in that machine, but may upgrade it to get more capacity. I would expect to see some improvement in the TiVo interfce based on what I saw with my old Philips DSR6000. I just used a single 7200 RPM 250 GB PATA drive (a Samsung) that I paid $59.00 for at Micro Center. I am very happy with the results.