Pauli said:
Faster with better seek times are completely useless qualities for a TiVo drive. It will either be fast enough or it won't. In TiVos, a 5400 RPM drive will perform exactly the same as a 7200 RPM drive and will likely run cooler and quieter, MUCH more important qualities. If high-capacity 5400 drives were readily available, I would be buying those for TiVo upgrades instead of 7200RPM models. That said, the Seagate drive you found is at a good price, but I prefer the 160GB WD drives or Samsung P80 160GB drives because they support AAM and Seagates don't and can also be had at that price point.
The choice was dictated primarily from availability. The WD drives available were more expensive ($20), and didn't have the rebates at the time. It would have been a $70 difference in price (after rebate of course).
I can't see how seek times and speed don't affect the performance. Rotational speed has a direct effect on disk I/O. Granted, you won't see the change in viewing video streams, as it's either fast enough or not. I imagine this is especially true in Tivo's, since they are really single use computers. However, I can imagine a faster drive would make a difference in non-video viewing tasks. My Tivo was dog slow for just about any operation (menus, season pass changes/updates, etc.) even well before the disk started to fail. However, reading all the threads here about increases in capacity lead me to believe I was going to get a reduction in non-viewing perfomance. That was not the case. I was waiting 1-2 minutes for a season pass change before, now it happens in under 15 seconds.
Granted, I may have had a questionable drive in the thing from the beginning. However it did last 2 years before starting to fail. No glitches before last saturday night (1/7/2006). I was lucky to get the drive out and and transferred to the new one.
I was concerned about the potential for it running hotter than before. It's been running between 40-42C since I replaced the drive, which is the same as the old drive.
