Current Recommendations for Hard Drives?

[BenMorgan]

Looking to upgrade the HD in my TiVo and was wondering what current available Hard Drives are best? I read some things recently about the Seagae series 9 and 10 drives having problems, does anyone have any experience with them in a Tivo? They're going rather cheap locally!

[catdog]

I recently replaced my 120gig drive with a Seagate 320gig (series 10 I think) with no problems - I think there are only problems if you try to use two drives together. The only issue I came across was that once the drive started getting full the tivo seemed to get a bit slow (loading now showing or when selecting a show from the tv guide to record). This has lead me to also upgrade to a cachecard to get back shorter loading times similar to what I had with the smaller drive.

[BenMorgan]

Got a response from a guy at tivocommunity (the UK pages), apparently the Seagate series 9 and 10 require more power than the old series 8 and below. As such Tivo's PSU can't give enough power to run 2 Seagate series 9 and 10 drives in one machine but as long as you stick to a single drive it'll work fine...

As well as Seagates Samsungs also come very highly recommended from the UK lot. Western Digital, Maxtor and Hitachi much less so though.

[TimesOwn]

According to the current ratings on original and recent HDD's the recent ones draw significantly less power. An original two drive set pulls 27.6 watts, current circa 300G drives pull less than 10 each. I question your informers information. I understand the problem running two series 10 300G seagate drives is more to do with their design, some of the knowledgeable chaps here have written dogmatically about this, understanding the detail why could be interesting.

[petestrash]

Agreed the current draw on Seagates newer drives was blamed (by uninformed people) for causing the issues with dual drives in a TiVo.

Apart from the spec's clearly showing this is not the case, we have tried practical tests using external psu's which had the same results.

I have had in depth conversations with Seagate about this they have changed their interface design and this is what is causing the issues with some older ATA33 devices like TiVo.

I have no hesitation in recomending Seagate drives for their quietness and long warranty. The only problem is you cannot use two of them in the same TiVo. But adding a second drive of a different brand is not an issue.

Peter.

PS there is a range of Seagate drives designed for PVR use (DB35) which are currently available and do not have this issue, but they are more expensive and can be harder to find.

[TimesOwn]

Peter,

Are you saying I can run a Seagate 320G and a Samsung 300G and expect these to then run fine together? (Wouldn't that be cool!)

Can the second be added after build time, or do they need to be initially paired together?

[petestrash]

Yep Seagate & Samsung together no problems, marry them at any time does not have to be at first install.

Personally with such large drives available today I wouldn't install 2 large drives in a single TiVo. 2 drives means twice the chance of loosing a drive, and once a drive goes down you cannot retrieve what is on the other drive.

Peter.