Why no 3TB option?

It's the market: it's hard to find 2.5" hard drives that have more than 2TB storage. And apparently, TiVo wanted a smaller box, and so a 3.5" hard drive was not possible. Me, I would have made the box slightly taller and gone with 3.5" drives (and it would have cost TiVo less in the end, as well).

 

^^^ What @Mikeguy said. See also this additional background from @gary.buhrmaster regarding 2.5" 3TB drives (originally in reply to me on one of the original endless Edge threads):

 

2TB per box so you will buy more boxes.

 

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I don't know. More importantly for my purchase decision, why no 13 days of accurate guide data option?

 

I agree, 2TB is a show stopper for me. I'm not even one to keep shows or movies around. I know a lot of people are obsessive compulsive about watching every show they record and then deleting the show once they watch it. I'm not sure I understand why you would ever do that since the Tivo automatically deletes old shows. Anyway, my use scenario is I record way to many shows than I could ever watch, but like to pick and chose what I watch of the recorded shows. For example, I record ALL of the late night shows, but only watch the parts of ones that have actors on that I am interested in. I also record a ton of college and NFL football and then skip through each game that I feel like watching in about an hour and then leave many games unwatched to be automatically deleted. Plus we've got three different people in the house with their particular programming likes. 2TB isn't going to cut it and I'm not running two DVRs in one house.

 

LOL. There is one person in my house, me, and I'm running a pair of 3TB TiVos (Bolt and Roamio Plus).

 

Just like a SSD transfer rate will slow when it starts getting too full so will a HDD.
Reason is HDD have the highest transfer rates on the outer area of the platter. As you fill up the drive you move progressively toward the inner area so the transfer rate decreases.
If your HDD is 80-90% full the transfer rate will slow down.

 

This is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I'll set aside the SSD transfer rate statement since it has nothing to do with this. You actually have no clue where the data is being written on the drive physically. The linux filesystem doesn't give too much of a crap and would think nothing of splattering the files all over the partition, which likely spans multiple platters. The linux file system also has no problem dealing with these large files on a nearly full hard drive too. Fragmentation would be minimal. Plus, you might be continually deleting and writing to the slowest part of the platter too. The linux filesystem isn't going to defrag and optimize the data to move it to the fastest parts of the physical drives. Anyway, I've got six records and at the same time three reads going on regularly on a 99% full drive and haven't had any problems for six years on the series 5's and another decade on prior Tivo models.

If deleting the programs manually makes you feel good, then have at it, but there is no need on Tivos.

 

A couple of points of clarification here. First, we chose 2.5" drives for BOLT and EDGE because they tend to be quieter, use less power and in the 1TB-2TB range are about the same cost/GB as 3.5" drives. HDD vendors have now moved almost exclusively to SMR drives, and the max capacity for 2.5" drives is now 2TB.

Also, while the comment about drive performance decreasing with capacity can sometimes be true, these drives deliver *far* more bandwidth than we need, even at our 11-stream maximum usage profile. The EDGE motherboard was designed to support 3.5" drives as well, and we have not ruled out the idea of a larger size unit at some point in the product lifecycle.

 

Also, in case it isn't obvious to everyone, an SSD would not be appropriate in a 24/7 DVR environment. In a 6-tuner box, the average SSD wouldn't even last a year under our workloads.

 

Something tells me you're going to regret ringing that bell around here @TiVo_Ted. Get ready for the, "When is the larger size unit coming?!" pestering.

 

Ooh, finally, a 10TB TiVo box!

 

Not until they fox the bug(s) in the code that currently limit them to 3TB.

 

Yes that's dangerous. TCF is like the elephant that never forgets. A whole herd of them, stampeding towards TE3 right now.

 

That's not really a bug, that's done by design, since 3TB is the largest hard drive they have ever sold units with, that's the most they will officially support.

 

Already have it. It's called Roamio Plus at my house!

 

It's very easy to find 2.5" hard drives up to 5TB.
What's hard is finding larger capacity 2.5" hard drives that use PMR. Most use SMR now.

 

Thank you Ted for the insight and all that you do on our behalf. That said, an Edge containing a 3.5" hard drive should have been a launch product.

Overall, we Tivo loyalists are tired of feeling like we are not important enough to be listened to. The demand for larger capacity drives has gone ignored (along with several other requests) for like a decade now. SMH

 

If Ted means the board and the current case can hold a 3.5" drive, then I expect we'll see modded EDGE units from WeaKnees and DIYers real soon!