Hard Drive Replacement Issue

2458 Views 9 Replies 5 Participants Last post by Series3Sub, Sep 1, 2020

ThomGonzales

Discussion Starter · May 3, 2020

Can you please help with a replacement of the old harddrive in Roamio Pro?

I am trying to update the existing hard drive with WD Red 3TB NAS (WD30EFX). Install was so easy, but once plugged her in and started the reboot, it froze on the Welcome Screen. Green Light but never the yellow light. Waited what seemed like half-hour and it never moved. I plugged the old drive back in and it started slowly but normally. Do I have the wrong drive? Am I doing something wrong?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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ThAbtO

· #2 · May 3, 2020 (Edited)

May be a bad drive. Try connect to PC and run diagnostics. Also, check the cables, they may have come loose. The data cable at the MB side also.

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ThomGonzales

Discussion Starter · #3 · May 4, 2020

Retried the cables. I was able to get a yellow flash on boot, which was an improvement, but it continues to sit on the "welcome! starting up..." page sadly.

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V7Goose

· #4 · May 4, 2020

ThomGonzales said:
I am trying to update the existing hard drive with WD Red 3TB NAS (WD30EFX).

You seem to have left out the most important part of the model number (missing a letter). efRx drives = good; efAx drives = bad.

If you have an EFAX drive, it MAY be your problem. I do not know for sure if that drive normally boots OK in a new TiVo installation, but even if it does, we expect any SMR drive to fail relatively quickly in a DVR application

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ThomGonzales

Discussion Starter · #5 · May 4, 2020

Thanks. I checked and noted that, in fact, it is an EFAX (WD30EFAX). I'll wrap it up, order the WD30EFRX, and try again.

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ThAbtO

· #6 · May 4, 2020

V7Goose said:
You seem to have left out the most important part of the model number (missing a letter). efRx drives = good; efAx drives = bad.

If you have an EFAX drive, it MAY be your problem. I do not know for sure if that drive normally boots OK in a new TiVo installation, but even if it does, we expect any SMR drive to fail relatively quickly in a DVR application

I don't see much of a difference in the EFRX and EFAX, except for the cache size.

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HerronScott

· #7 · May 4, 2020

ThAbtO said:
I don't see much of a difference in the EFRX and EFAX, except for the cache size.

The EFAX is SMR....

Scott

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ThomGonzales

Discussion Starter · #8 · May 6, 2020

rec'd the WD30EFRX today, install'd it, and we're back in business. Cycled nicely and ran. The only hiccup involved needing to reactivate my cable card with ComCast. Thanks for your help.

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Series3Sub

· #9 · May 8, 2020 (Edited)

ThAbtO said:
I don't see much of a difference in the EFRX and EFAX, except for the cache size.

That's because WD and other big name HDD brands do NOT disclose that those HDD's are SMR (and Drive Managed SMR, even worse for some uses). There is a really great thread on here about it, or you can Google it and you will find several articles on the subject along with very upset users who have had absolute heartache with thier RAID's and all because WD (and others) did NOT disclose this very important fact--intentionally--that makes all the difference in the world with DVR and RAID uses, and WD is now having to play the aplogetic "we were wrong; our screw-up; please forgive us; please don't stop buying our products" mea culpa game. Good greif! As if they really believed that it would not make a difference in certain applications. They knew, but SMR's are CHEAPER to manufacture, so yeah, the consumer will never know--WRONG! IN some uses, the write can be just terribly slow depending upon how much data is to be written/re-written using the very small amount of PMR/CMR on the drive that acts as temp memory for the data while things are shingled.

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Series3Sub

· #10 · Sep 1, 2020

ThomGonzales said:
rec'd the WD30EFRX today, install'd it, and we're back in business. Cycled nicely and ran. The only hiccup involved needing to reactivate my cable card with ComCast. Thanks for your help.

I should add that the Cache size CAN BE an indication of the drive being SMR or PMR/CMR. If the cache is larger, than that could indicate the drive is SMR because SMR's need more cache for the re-writes because more data has to be cached for SMR to re-write properly, but still--at times--more slowly.

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