USB Hard drives on Series 2 USB ports

Carnage_7 said:

I see that TiVo has enabled the eSATA port on Series 3 tivos. Have they enabled the USB ports on Series 2 to accomodate a USB hard drive? If not, why not?

Frank
El Paso, Texas

Click to expand...

Can't be done as the hardware was never designed for that function, for the "why" you would have to ask TiVo an they (I doubt ) would not tell you but many on this board will offer you an option as to why.

No they haven't.

No real idea why not. (USB CPU utilization might be part of it, the Series 2 isn't exactly equiped with a cutting edge processor.)

I suspect bandwidth is a big reason why USB isn't used for an external hard drive. The eSATA connection on the Series 3 (both models) is an extension of the bus used by the internal drive. USB is 480 megabits/sec, whereas eSATA is up to 3 gigabits/sec. And there is a lot of overhead in the USB protocol.

CharlesH said:

I suspect bandwidth is a big reason why USB isn't used for an external hard drive. The eSATA connection on the Series 3 (both models) is an extension of the bus used by the internal drive. USB is 480 megabits/sec, whereas eSATA is up to 3 gigabits/sec. And there is a lot of overhead in the USB protocol.

Click to expand...

I believe the Series 2 usb ports are only USB 1.0 which if I remember correctly is only 10 mbit/sec.

They're USB 2.0 ports. The old stock drivers (pegasus.o?) were for USB 1.1 but the latest ones support 2.0.

Some older S2 boxes have USB 1.1 hardware, but most have 2.0. I have seen it where people who hacked the boxes added drivers to recognize a USB hard disk, but this can't be tied in to the TiVo file system. I doubt that TiVo is going to expend any effort in the direction of USB expansion, since they have eSATA ports on the two high-end boxes they can use this as market differentiation.

The TiVo just can't sustain throughput to use USB for recording or playback. The best they could do on USB is using the drive as some kind of secondary storage - like a local MRV kind of thing. You could move content to the drive and back.

As was pointed out, the eSATA port is a direct connection to the SATA controller and is exactly the same as adding a second internal drive.