Elite BIOS allow drives greater than 2 TB?

At least one guy is saying they will try he gets a 3TB drive he ordered. There are two threads that are the primary Elite discussion threads:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=476979
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8744093

I don't know specifically about the TiVo, but the standard BIOS can not support drives over 2TB. At least not as boot drives. On the PC side mobo manufacturers are having to switch to UEFI to allow booting from drives bigger then 2TB.

My point is that if TiVo is truly using a BIOS, and not UEFI, then it's unlikely you'll be able to replace the internal drive with anything larger then 2TB. You may be able to go bigger for an external eSATA drive, but that depends on how TiVo handles partitioning internally.

Dan

I've got a 3TB drive ready to test, but my Elite won't arrive until Monday.

Dan203 said:

I don't know specifically about the TiVo, but the standard BIOS can not support drives over 2TB. At least not as boot drives. On the PC side mobo manufacturers are having to switch to UEFI to allow booting from drives bigger then 2TB.

My point is that if TiVo is truly using a BIOS, and not UEFI, then it's unlikely you'll be able to replace the internal drive with anything larger then 2TB. You may be able to go bigger for an external eSATA drive, but that depends on how TiVo handles partitioning internally.

Dan

Click to expand...

Yes - I guess I should have asked if the Tivo had a UEFI like my new comp does . Bottom line - if it does not have a modified BIOS or UEFI then prolly won't ever work with more than 2TB.

Dan203 said:

I don't know specifically about the TiVo, but the standard BIOS can not support drives over 2TB. At least not as boot drives. On the PC side mobo manufacturers are having to switch to UEFI to allow booting from drives bigger then 2TB.

Click to expand...

Nuts. I forgot about that.

I have a 3TB drive arriving tomorrow that I was going to try a copy with, but now I'm thinking it's even less likely to work.

As far as external drives, Tivo only supports the WD My Book DVR 500GB and 1TB extenders (except on the original Series 3 boxes).

Hmmm... so that is interesting. So I can get the Elite AND a 1 TB extender? Thats sort of nice...

deathpulse said:

Hmmm... so that is interesting. So I can get the Elite AND a 1 TB extender? Thats sort of nice...

Click to expand...

At Weaknees you can get the Elite and a 2TB extender.

Personally though I've never been a fan of having an external hard drive connected. Especially the way that TiVo marries them. Since if you lose one drive you lose the content on both of them. If one drive could be lost and still keep the content on the other that would be better. But when using two drives I was always more comfortable with using two internal drives instead, like you could with earlier SD TiVos and the first HD TiVos on DirecTV.

aaronwt said:

Personally though I've never been a fan of having an external hard drive connected.

Click to expand...

I haven't either. I think it is a horrible idea.

Especially the way that TiVo marries them. Since if you lose one drive you lose the content on both of them. If one drive could be lost and still keep the content on the other that would be better.

Click to expand...

And with two drives, you double the chance of failure over any given time. Plus there are two power supplies to fail, also. It was stupid for TiVo to have designed the drives to "meld" together, instead of keeping things separate.

Of course, I also think it was stupid to have a non-removable hard drive in the TiVo. For $5 or $10 more, the drive could have been in a user-serviceable, easy-to-swap tray. Since the hard drive failure accounts for probably 95% of TiVo failures, imagine how much cheaper and more convenient it would be for TiVo to simply ship out a new drive...

If TiVo does hang in there long enough for a Series 5, I do hope they will switch to removable 2.5" hard drives for storage, and use an SD card to store the settings, preferences, and OS.