[CrispyCritter]

What can I say? You have network problems. It's not the TiVo; lots of people get much higher speeds than you with "b" adapters. Lots of posts about looking at networks. Good luck!

 

[CrispyCritter]

Unacceptable speeds.
There is nothing wrong with my network.

I agree your speeds are unacceptable. But I don't know anybody with lots of networking experience who would claim "There is nothing wrong with my network" at this point in your investigation. Networks are treacherous beasts (I've been running home networks since the 1980's; and have been wrong about the network any number of times.)

What are your TiVoToGo transfer times? The key now is to narrow down the problem to a single TiVo if possible. (If you want to skip all the intermediate steps, the last resort would be moving and directly connecting the two TiVos with a crossover cable. If you are still getting transfers at 3-5 times real-time, then I would believe it's not the network.)

 

[CrispyCritter]

The relatively few early TiVo Series2 models beginning with 1 (eg (140)) have USB 1.1 hardware and nothing can change that to USB 2.0. The vast majority of TiVo Series2 models, whose numbers begin with 2 or 5 (240, 540, ...), have USB 2.0 hardware which is finally taken advantage of in 7.1 for the first time.

 

[CrispyCritter]

It is only the first sign in retrospect. At the time it was a bit of oddness that aroused suspicion.

Suspicion? I don't recall that at all. I remember people getting excited about connecting their camera and other things (speculation about keyboards and joysticks) to the TiVo. Yes, there have always been people who've wanted to network their TiVo's, but that wasn't the direction TiVo was headed in way back then (4+ years ago; the Series2 is old!!!).

I agree in retrospect an ethernet port would have worked out better for them. But USB was considered a reasonable way for TiVo to go at the time.

 

[CrispyCritter]

knowing what they do now, why can't they just add an ethernet port to new tivos rolling off the assembly line at the moment? it'll still be series 2. just a series 2 with a "revision 1" at the end.

It would be a very major change, both at the hardware and the software level. The motherboard would have to be redesigned (it's a custom motherboard). At the software level, remember that TiVo is running normal Linux, but has very important real-time constraints on it. It absolutely has to be able to handle the incoming signal it's recording, and the signal it's outputting to the TV. Nothing else it does can be allowed to interfere with those two functions. So putting in a new ethernet port means revisiting the timings of all of their present algorithms to make sure that the new ethernet CPU/disk load won't interfere with the core functions while all the other activities are also running. Very difficult, and probably for not that much gain in speed. As HDTiVo says, the CPU is already the bottleneck for many activities.