[neophyte]

I've been a devoted Tivo lover for 20 years +. I've been very happy with my latest (premiere) for many years, but I'm getting upgrade fever, so I bought a Bolt and a Roamio, for $20 each. I like them both. Having 4 tuners is a definite plus! So now, I have to decide which one I'd like to have with lifetime (planning to find one on eBay or FB with lifetime included, rather than pay $500+ to add it to one of these $20 units).

I think I'm going to head down the path with Roamio - mostly because 3.5" drives are easier to find and more data available on which ones work with Tivo, but also I just get the feeling the Roamios are a slightly better machine. Differing opinions welcome and please explain.

The point of this post is looking for your expertise and/or experience with what these added tuners do to the life of the HDD. I've seen a discussion somewhere here in the community about how each tuner is writing to the 30 minute buffer 24/7/365, so it makes sense to me that 4 tuners might be twice as much wear and tear on the HDD. Any agreement or disagreement on that point?

Now, I see a Roamio Pro that I might like to buy, but I'm really not sure I need 6 tuners, especially if that means even shorter lifespan of the HDD. I just saw a post with some codes I can use to disable one or two (or three) of the tuners, can anyone confirm that?
Thank you for reading - any comments or suggestions appreciated.

 

[ThAbtO]

No.

Those Purple drives were built for security cameras, with 20+ camera feeds recording at the same time.

 

[JoeKustra]

I think I'm going to head down the path with Roamio - mostly because 3.5" drives are easier to find and more data available on which ones work with Tivo, but also I just get the feeling the Roamios are a slightly better machine. Differing opinions welcome and please explain.

That just about sums up my opinion. I have 3 basic Roamio boxes on line. Recording is split between them. Never had a HDD failure. Both have been upgraded. One to 1TB and one to 3TB. This is back when WD Green was the best drive. The one I use most was built in 2014. Both have had their fans replaced.

 

[tampa8]

Hoppers have 16 tuners with no high rate of failure so I guess not but I admit I would have thought so.

 

[bmgoodman]

I was searching for this very topic but I didn't find a lot. It seems to me that constant writing to the hard drive would wear it out faster. I see that the WD Red Plus drives are rated for a workload rate of 180 TB per year (https://documents.westerndigital.co...uct-brief-western-digital-wd-red-plus-hdd.pdf). Out of laziness I will call that 180,000 GB per year, or 20.5 GB per hour. That would be 3.42 GB/hour per tuner.

I haven't searched lately, but last I recall, cable companies are reducing the GB/hour to reduce bandwidth and give more channels. I think you'd want to check some of your recordings to get a sense for what is typical in your own case.

As for me, I keep suggestions off. I'm not watching all I've recorded anyway, so I don't see much point in thousands of other things I probably won't watch. The added benefit is I can look back at everything that was deleted for months in case a houseguest accidentally deletes something I hadn't watched. Less wear on the drive, and the ability to recover something I might still want. A pretty easy decision in my case.

Also, for the next person deciding between a used Bolt or Roamio, I'm pretty confident that the 2.5" drives won't outlast the 3.5" drives in most cases. Of course, a used Roamio will be older than a used Bolt, as will its drive, but it's so easy to replace it with a new 4TB WD Red Plus (now $85 MSRP) that you really should do that, rather than taking your chances with a possibly 8 year old drive.

 

[justen_m]

I have a Bolt and Roamio Plus, both upgraded to 3TB. I would go with the Roamio, mostly because of the 3.5" vs 2.5" internal drive.

As for me, I keep suggestions off. I'm not watching all I've recorded anyway, so I don't see much point in thousands of other things I probably won't watch. The added benefit is I can look back at everything that was deleted for months in case a houseguest accidentally deletes something I hadn't watched. [SNIP] and the ability to recover something I might still want. A pretty easy decision in my case.

That is definitely a useful benefit to turning off suggestions.

Less wear on the drive

I don't think that's one of 'em. The TiVo is still recording the 30-min buffers from all tuners.

 

[rpj22]

I don't think that's one of 'em. The TiVo is still recording the 30-min buffers from all tuners.

I don't agree. The only significant variable in the wear and tear is going to be head movement... not the reading and writing per se. Having a lot of writing of files outside of the normal locations on disk should increase head movement. That being said, I'm not worried about it.

That brings to mind something I've wondered about. For any programmers reading this: does TiVo hard allocate the buffers on disc in order to minimize head movement?

 

[ggieseke]

For any programmers reading this: does TiVo hard allocate the buffers on disc in order to minimize head movement?

I'm not sure what hard allocate means, but the minimum block allocation size in the MFS media zones is 10 MB (10,485,760 bytes). That's huge compared to most file systems.

 

[rpj22]

I'm not sure what hard allocate means, but the minimum block allocation size in the MFS media zones is 10 MB (10,485,760 bytes). That's huge compared to most file systems.

For this application, it makes sense that they would use huge block sizes. What I had in mind, though, was that at the time the system first sets up the disc, one or more entire tracks are permanently reserved for the "30 minute" buffers. That way, if no user scheduled recordings are going on, little or no head movement is required to service the "30 minute" buffers.

 

[justen_m]

For this application, it makes sense that they would use huge block sizes. What I had in mind, though, was that at the time the system first sets up the disc, one or more entire tracks are permanently reserved for the "30 minute" buffers. That way, if no user scheduled recordings are going on, little or no head movement is required to service the "30 minute" buffers.

I don't think that's the case.

If I am watching something "Live" and there is a 30-minute buffer, and I hit Record, it will record the entire program, including the data in the 30-minute buffer. I can even change it to KUID. So if there were a single location that was always used for the 30-minute buffers, this would fill up if I chose to record multiple things over time that started in the 30-minute buffer. Unless the act of me hitting record moves the data out of the 30-minute buffer region into another region for longer term storage. Somehow I doubt that is happening, but I don't know. I don't think the write location of 30-minute buffers differs from that of long-term storage, hence not significantly (any?) more head movement for suggestions than 30-minute buffer recording.

 

[JoeKustra]

I don't think that's the case.

It might be true. The recording buffer is true, but a 30 minute rewind is also true. When a new HDD is installed in a basic Roamio, 2 hours are used, according to System Information. This might imply that four 30 minute buffers are used. If somebody would install a new HDD in their Pro or Plus and report the reserved space as 3 hours, it might prove the case . But I'm the first to admit I have no idea how a TiVo does what it does. I can only report observations.

To add my observation to this line of thinking, I record ABC almost every night. It's Jimmy Kimmel Live! and always a recorded program from CA. I watch it the next day. Within the first 3 minutes of playback, there will be a video and audio "glitch". Audio first, then a blocking error. I'm thinking this is the point when the default buffer gets moved to its new location. I see this "within 3 minute" glitch mostly on ABC since it has the lowest bit-rate content. I never see it on NBC or CBS. Add to this that it does not have to change tuners, I think that when a recording starts, that tuner buffer is kept static and a new disk location is used.

Bottom line, I feel that a six tuner box will cause more wear on a HDD. Unless you always watch the same six channels. And we could start a similar thread on using a Mini.

 

[rpj22]

Unless the act of me hitting record moves the data out of the 30-minute buffer region into another region for longer term storage.

That was what I had in mind. The buffers would be fixed size and at fixed physical addresses. For user initiated recording, the data would be copied into blocks allocated by the file system in the conventional way. Either way could be made to work ... I was just curious about what they actually did.

 

[Worf]

In old versions of the TiVo OS, it was true - the live buffer would be pre-allocated on boot. You could even hack it to have a hour long buffer if you wanted. However, this was a fixed buffer, so if you hit record, the buffer was not dumped to a recording - instead, the recording started where you hit record. This was especially because on those old versions where they recorded analog video, the live buffer was highest quality, while the recording will be using the default recording quality.

However, since version 3 or so, when TiVo started having the ability to record digitally, the buffers are dynamically allocated - if you were recording from the live buffer, it would become part of the recording done at highest quality and a new live buffer allocated.

Quite likely the reason for it at first was not to minimize drive wear, but to conserve bandwidth - the first TiVos were slow pieces of hardware and their hard drive access speeds were the bottleneck.

The modern TiVo is much faster and I doubt there's any real need to minimize hard drive seeking - it doesn't really lower the amount of wear if you keep the head still versus seek it back and forth. Especially since seeking back and forth will happen if you're watching one program and recording another or many others.