Someone should start a class action lawsuit against TiVo!

9441 Views 66 Replies 34 Participants Last post by unitron, Apr 7, 2011

Dayvidpriddy

Discussion Starter · Mar 19, 2011

I am so fed up with this company I'm just about done with them!

I purchased TWO TiVo Series 3 HD boxes with lifetime service back in 2008. Sold one of the boxes/service about a year later when I downsized my apartment. Last year my remaining box died on me out of nowhere and when I phone TiVo about it, the girl admitted to me that all the drives in the Series 3 boxes were cheap and had manufacturing issues. Yet they still charged me 150 bucks to get a refurb even though they flat out admitted their stuff was cheap!

So my box dies in under 2 years, it's never been dropped or anything, just sits on the shelf minding it's own business, I spend all that money for equipment and lifetime service for this crap?

So now the refurb has now died on me as well...I've only had it a few months...it just died tonight! the box keeps rebooting itself randomly whenever it feels like it...another hard drive failure alert which is about to happen any day now.

I'm seriously ticked off that they do not support these boxes and replace them with the new Premier boxes, when they flat out admit their Series 3 equipment was cheap and not manufactured properly. But I'm not spending another dime on with this company, they have played me for the last time!

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tgbroom

· #2 · Mar 19, 2011

Hard drives fail. period. all of them do, at some point. obviously you are frustrated, emotional and pissed. I have 3 - series 3 and all of the hard drives have failed and were easily replaced with hd's from weaknees, it is a piece of cake. they have been running strong since replacement and I put bigger drives in them which made for a nice upgrade. There is no better DVR than TIVO, and I have had frustrations with company from time to time for different corp decisions on products, but you really can't blame them because some cust serv person said that they hd's were cheap. they run 24/7/365 and they are not scsi, they work their @ss of all the freaking time when you are sleeping. Take deep breath, order new hd and get back to enjoying your S3.
Good Day.

Tim

Dayvidpriddy

Discussion Starter · #3 · Mar 19, 2011

With all due respect...

The original HD started failing after the first year of ownership, a good quality hard drive does not fail that quickly!

The refurb hard drive is only a few months old, do you also think enough time has passed for that hard drive to fail as well?

I have hard drives (both internal and external) that I've had for years and they are still running with no problems, but TiVo hard drives that you pay 300 bucks for (unit included) as well as another 300 for lifetime does not?

Seriously, you are defending this?

I'm not spending another dime on this crap company! There are many reports on the internet about how expensive TiVo is (regarding their hardware fails way to quick), yes you are damn right I'm "frustrated"! Basically I paid 150 bucks for a refurb that lasted me 3 months...LMAO...seriously man...again you are defending this?

Give me your cc number while you are at it so I can buy that new drive that you so desperately want me to own!

Unbelievable!

P.S. I have friends who have the series 2 (box before HD came out), they don't have any issues with their devices and still have the original hard drives in them...the things are like 5 plus years old! Now do you really want to keep defending TiVo regarding the Series 3? I can't believe I've spent over 1300 bucks to record TV for the past two years and can't even get equipment that lasts. Maybe they should dump the damn hard drives and switch over to flash drives or something, it's obvious hard drives do not last in TiVo's... Oh yea and they still can't seem to integrate built in Wi-Fi in the new Premier boxes? LOL...this is 2011, everything has built in Wi-Fi but TiVo still can't manage to pull it off? LMAO!!!

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orangeboy

· #4 · Mar 19, 2011

Dayvidpriddy said:
Basically I paid 150 bucks for a refurb that lasted me 3 months...

The TiVo DVR Limited Warranty policy doesn't have any exclusions for refurbished products. Send it back for a replacement.

Edit: FWIW, my Series 3 harddrive failed after 4½ years. A recently purchased 2TB drive for my PC failed after 27 days.

steve614

· #5 · Mar 19, 2011

Dayvidpriddy said:
I have hard drives (both internal and external) that I've had for years and they are still running with no problems

But I bet you don't have them being constantly written to 24/7/365. Hard drives in Tivos never get a break unless you unplug them.

Dayvidpriddy said:
Maybe they should dump the damn hard drives and switch over to flash drives or something

Bad idea. See the above comment about the hard drive being constanly written to.
Flash (SSD) drives have a finite number of times they can be written to before they fail. Putting one in a Tivo is not recommended.

dlfl

· #6 · Mar 19, 2011

OP, what does TiVo say about your premature failure of the refurb unit? (You have asked, right?)

The common wisdom that exists at least on this forum is that Series 3 drives failing after 1 or 2 years of service is not abnormal. Whether this is true of all similarly sized drives in all other DVR's is an interesting question.

nrc

· #7 · Mar 19, 2011

Dayvidpriddy said:
I have hard drives (both internal and external) that I've had for years and they are still running with no problems, but TiVo hard drives that you pay 300 bucks for (unit included) as well as another 300 for lifetime does not?

Your $300 investment doesn't make TiVo immune the same failures that affect every other electronics device. Usually devices fail when they're still relatively new, or they fail when they're much older. Look up "bathtub curve."

I've worked with thousands of hard drives costing ten times what a TiVo costs and they're subject to the same failure curve as every thing else. You can reduce it with expensive testing and burn-in, but it's almost impossible to eliminate.

Refurbs are a little different case. I suspect refurbs sometimes fail because of a latent problem that caused the original device to be returned, but wasn't detected by testing during the refurb process. Again, this is a risk with all refurbs.

I like you're idea of a class action suit, though. I don't think anyone has ever suggested that. You should really run with it.

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steve614

· #8 · Mar 19, 2011

nrc said:
I like you're idea of a class action suit, though. I don't think anyone has ever suggested that. You should really run with it.

Not really worth it. Even if he/we won the case, the lawyers would get most of the settlement money.

JohnnyCruzr

· #9 · Mar 19, 2011

Class action lawsuit means:

TiVo pays millions in the settlement.

The lawyer keeps millions of what HE won.

Every consumer in the settlement gets a $3.00 check.

EVERY TiVo customer pays more in monthly subscription fee's to pay for the settlement (including the ones who got the $3.00 check)

So who's the only winner in a class action lawsuit? The lawyer. And I'm not a lawyer, so count me out.

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Dayvidpriddy

Discussion Starter · #10 · Mar 19, 2011

dlfl said:
OP, what does TiVo say about your premature failure of the refurb unit? (You have asked, right?)

The common wisdom that exists at least on this forum is that Series 3 drives failing after 1 or 2 years of service is not abnormal. Whether this is true of all similarly sized drives in all other DVR's is an interesting question.

Having a hard drive fail after 1-2 years is NOT abnormal? I totally disagree with that statement! While it does happen it is my NO MEANS the "norm." I'm calling them up this evening to find out if they are going to replace this for me, this death happened last night and they were closed. I'll post back when after.

BTW...the lawsuit statement was just to get peoples attention on here...yea right like I'm going to waste my time doing that? NOT! But in general there are TONS of complaints about the Series 3 boxes, there is definitely a defect somewhere that's causing all of these issues cause they were not happening like this in the boxes before the Series 3.

telcoman

· #11 · Mar 19, 2011

Dayvidpriddy said:
Having a hard drive fail after 1-2 years is NOT abnormal? I totally disagree with that statement! While it does happen it is my NO MEANS the "norm." I'm calling them up this evening to find out if they are going to replace this for me, this death happened last night and they were closed. I'll post back when after.

BTW...the lawsuit statement was just to get peoples attention on here...yea right like I'm going to waste my time doing that? NOT! But in general there are TONS of complaints about the Series 3 boxes, there is definitely a defect somewhere that's causing all of these issues cause they were not happening like this in the boxes before the Series 3.

I have three series 3 Tivo's for over three years with no problem.
Two of them were moved recently into an audio cabinet from the top of my Sony TV as I expect to get a flat screen soon.
Inside the cabinet I placed a thermometer which was reading over 85 degrees.
I now leave the cabinet open so the temp is down in the mid seventies.
My question to you is are your TIVO's in an enclosed cabinet?

Heat causes many electronic failures

Dayvidpriddy

Discussion Starter · #12 · Mar 19, 2011

I'm on the phone right now with TiVo, they claim there will be a fee to replace the refurb...no surprise there!

No my box is NOT enclosed whatsoever.

UPDATE: One supervisor later and I got it changed out for free...lucky me and thanks for the advice on here guys...I was surprised they would do this for free!

shwru980r

· #13 · Mar 19, 2011

Dayvidpriddy said:
Yet they still charged me 150 bucks to get a refurb even though they flat out admitted their stuff was cheap!

The refurbished unit probably doesn't have a new hard drive in it either. It's easier and cheaper to just buy a used Tivo HD without service and swap the hard drive yourself. You can easily find one for under $50. If the problem turns out to be the power supply, you can swap that out too.

wmcbrine

· #14 · Mar 19, 2011

If you knew how many times "class action" came up here, you wouldn't think of it as an attention-getter. It's more like a running joke.

Lensman

· #15 · Mar 19, 2011

Dayvidpriddy said:
I'd love to see if we could contact her and ask what was "cheap" about the HDDs in the series 3 boxes. I'm unaware of any modern 3.5" drives that are significantly different from any others - WD, Hitachi, Seagate, they're all equally good at the consumer level. (And for any of you know-it-alls who've had drive problems, please substitute "equally bad" for "equally good") Each of those companies has had bad batches that have resulted in higher failure rates causing a flurry of consumers and pro-sumers to say "I don't trust Seagate" or "I don't trust WD".

Bottom line: She just made that up to try to make you feel better and failed miserably or she was misinformed.

BTW: I recommend Hitachi drives. I've always had good experiences with them. Too bad they've just gotten bought out by WD.

janry

· #16 · Mar 19, 2011

wmcbrine said:
If you knew how many times "class action" came up here, you wouldn't think of it as an attention-getter. It's more like a running joke.

And the people posting about doing it are the butts of the jokes.

Sorry it happened to the OP but if he had come here first, he would have seen how simple it would have been to do a self upgrade and have a better DVR with more capacity.

wmhjr

· #17 · Mar 20, 2011

janry said:
And the people posting about doing it are the butts of the jokes.

Sorry it happened to the OP but if he had come here first, he would have seen how simple it would have been to do a self upgrade and have a better DVR with more capacity.

The OP is right. He shouldn't have to come here first, pay MORE out of his pocket for a self upgrade, and then have a "better" product when the one he bought to begin with should work properly.

As somebody who has purchased literally thousands of Fiberchannel, iSCSI, etc drives costing far more than a consumer grade drive as well as low end eSATA drives (frankly as well as MFM, RLL, ESDI, SCSI, IDE, EIDE and pretty much every other alphabet soup drive in the past 25 years) I also consider the idea that "drives fail" or "it's normal" as crap. Equally BS is the idea that the Tivo is somehow unique in that it is constantly writing to the drive. Tivo doesn't make their own drives, but they are responsible for its performance, as well as the environmental factors which can dramatically affect the lifespan of the drives. And most importantly, it's a core component of their product. If they're not going to support it, they're in the wrong business. Period.

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Langree

· #18 · Mar 20, 2011

wmhjr said:
The OP is right. He shouldn't have to come here first, pay MORE out of his pocket for a self upgrade, and then have a "better" product when the one he bought to begin with should work properly.

As somebody who has purchased literally thousands of Fiberchannel, iSCSI, etc drives costing far more than a consumer grade drive as well as low end eSATA drives (frankly as well as MFM, RLL, ESDI, SCSI, IDE, EIDE and pretty much every other alphabet soup drive in the past 25 years) I also consider the idea that "drives fail" or "it's normal" as crap. Equally BS is the idea that the Tivo is somehow unique in that it is constantly writing to the drive. Tivo doesn't make their own drives, but they are responsible for its performance, as well as the environmental factors which can dramatically affect the lifespan of the drives. And most importantly, it's a core component of their product. If they're not going to support it, they're in the wrong business. Period.

So in ALL your grand experience buying all levels and types of drives. you've never experienced premature or early failure? Even in systems that constantly use and tax drives the way TiVos do? Since it can be assumed by your statement you've used such systems in your vast years of experience.

wmhjr

· #19 · Mar 20, 2011

Langree said:
So in ALL your grand experience buying all levels and types of drives. you've never experienced premature or early failure? Even in systems that constantly use and tax drives the way TiVos do? Since it can be assumed by your statement you've used such systems in your vast years of experience.

No, in my "grand" experience I'll say a few things - which frankly I already said but you'd prefer to ignore rather than actually taking my points accurately. It's why I rarely post here. Far too many fanboys in love with Tivo and overly defensive of Tivo even when there are obvious issues with their product, service, or both.

1) There are many many systems which tax drives equally if not more than the Tivo. In addition, there are even ways in which Tivo could have implemented strategies which would allow users to effectively put the constant read/write "to sleep" other than downing the system knowing that the process of bringing it back online takes so ridiculously long. Can you say "You're almost there" for about 15 minutes?

2) That notwithstanding, Tivo depends on those drives for the very core functionality of the product. Which leads to:

3) Tivo either needs to support their product - which INCLUDES those drives - or get out of the business. The product is worthless without the drive. Drive failure is a critical failure mode. Therefore, there needs to be mitigation in the event of failure as well as better support.

What spawned my response with the frankly unfriendly comment that I quoted where the OP was effectively blamed for not paying more money out of his pocket to "improve" a product that he already paid for.

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wedgecon

· #20 · Mar 20, 2011

Google did a large study on hard drive failure rates and found that:

About 7% of hard drives fail in the first year.
About 8 % fail in the second year.
About 9% fail in the third year.
About 6% fail in the fourth year.
About 7% fail in the fifth year

So almost 40% of hard drives fail within 5 years. The only rule about hard drives is not if they will fail only when.

Drives are cheap enough now that the DVR's really should have RAID standard.

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