largest hard drive

[theviss]

What is the largest size drive I can out into my replay?

I have a 5040 and want a larger, single drive system.

Can I use any brand of disk?

thanks

[mhargr03]

"Before you ask...Please read the ReplayTV FAQ!" (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?threadid=88112)

there is also a really neat search feature. your question has been discussed at length on many occasions

but the answer to your first question is 400 GB :)

[theviss]

Yes, I tried that first. There are only 2 pages of posts though. Is there some setting to show more?

[lizard_boy]

Most people use Maxtor, Western Digital or Seagate - any of these would work fine. Best price/size ratio tends to be in the 160GB - 250GB range.

[WannabeSQ]

yeah, 250Gb seems to be the best price point. the 300GB drives cost close to $200 while 250GB ones on sale have been around $100 after rebate. I have 2 5250s and 2 5040s, one of my 5040s is gonna become at least a "5080" if not bigger, the drive is starting to go (on my newest unit BTW, a refurb bought during the next to last pause ad coupon deal.

[plyons10]

Also... depending on your viewing habits, anything over 200GB might be "too" big.

Many of us use DVArchive to keep programs we want around for along time archived on our PCs. Also, with the current firmware, standard quality recordings are good enuf for most purposes.

Above 160 or 200 hours, sometimes the replay guide gets really slow too.

[seidelhd]

I've got 2 160gigs from the Black Friday sales (these were < $0.25/gig). One is going to upgrade my 5040 to a 5160 and the other is going for DVArchive. Then I'm going to take the spare 80gig from my computer and turn my 5504 into a 5508. I'll probably put that 40gig drive into an external enclosure.

[theviss]

Thanks all.

Sounds like it does not matter what manufacturer.

Also sounds like if it gets too big, the guide slows down.

One more thing, does the disk speed matter or will it take 5400 or 7200?

[WannabeSQ]

Originally posted by plyons10
Also... depending on your viewing habits, anything over 200GB might be "too" big.

Many of us use DVArchive to keep programs we want around for along time archived on our PCs. Also, with the current firmware, standard quality recordings are good enuf for most purposes.

Above 160 or 200 hours, sometimes the replay guide gets really slow too.

You're right. I bet most people dont record as much as I do. I record everything at medium quality, so I don't have that many hours. I also have 1.6TB of DVArchive space, so I am probably an exception to the norm.


To answer the last question, drive speed doesn't matter. Some say that the 7200 ones are hotter, but I haven't had any problems due to heat. My drive(maxtor) died cause it was recording 24/7. Its replacement (WD) is doing just fine. I have both maxtor and WD in my DVA, and the maxtors have been more reliable, so I don't really care which brand I buy anymore.

[chadjones99]

what ATA do they need to be
i have used a 160 gig 133ATA but i see some good deals one 100ATA drives
i want to make another single drive system. will this work ?

[WarrenJ]

Also... depending on your viewing habits, anything over 200GB might be "too" big.
Peter,

Well, maybe in Afghanistan, but this is America! Too big ?!? C'mon . . . :D

Regards,
Warren

[xwilliam]

For all intents and purposes, ata/100 and ata/133 are the same thing. Very few combinations of motherboards, hard drives and software can take advantage of the theoretical increase in bandwidth that ata/133 provides. ReplayTV certainly will not show any benefit. Get which ever is cheaper per MB and pay no attention to the bus speed.

Also, FWIW, I seek out drives with at least three year warranties. Seagate's five year warranty on *all* their drives should not be overlooked! A one year warranty stinks and is all too common these days. WD lets you increase it to three years for a fee. Three years should be considered minimum and adequate. But that five year Seagate is just great. After five years, you won't really care if it dies.

[mhargr03]

May as well ask it here...for all of you with behemoth DVA servers, do you find that after about 400 GB or so access from the Replays to the DVA Server slows up due to the huge amount of guide data to load? Is there anything I can do to ease this impending issue? I have about 800 gb of storage space on my DVA machine (about 400 gb worth of shows so far) and it seems to be quite slow accessing the DVA machine...

for the OP, FWIW all my 8 drives are Seagate 200 gb drives with 5 year warranties (2 SATA, 6 IDE - 2 in my 2 Replays) and I have no complaints thus far...plus the price can't be beat when Outpost.com has the 200gb on sale for $59 or $69 after rebate

ps - the fee xwilliam was referring to is $14.95 to upgrade a new WD from 1 to 3 years...Maxtor absolutely offers no such option

[YBDBDOO]

On one of my dva servers, I have 1600 shows, 1.7 terabytes. I have one category called "Active",and another called "Inactive". Active never has more than about 300 shows.

The guide navigation degradation seems to start at about 200 shows, gets annoying at 300, is almost unusable at around 500 shows.

Hope that helps.

[mhargr03]

YBDBDOO, how do you set up your "active" and "inactive" so that guide navigation is not affected?

[plyons10]

Originally posted by WarrenJ
Peter,

Well, maybe in Afghanistan, but this is America! Too big ?!? C'mon . . . :D

Regards,
Warren

Hey... I did use the quotation marks, didn't I?

[plyons10]

Originally posted by theviss
Thanks all.

Sounds like it does not matter what manufacturer.

Also sounds like if it gets too big, the guide slows down.

One more thing, does the disk speed matter or will it take 5400 or 7200?

Not to resurrect and old and somewhat pointless debate, but I am one of those users who felt that his guide navigation response times were improved when he upgraded to a 7200 rpm drive. That's all I have to say on that.

[sonomatom]

YBDBDOO you just have all your DVA shows in 2 categories?

I'm very curious because I'm a bit under the 300 show level, (246 shows at about 390 Gigs) but they are spread amongst 6 categories (i.e. Movies - Music - NaturalScience - etc.)

Does that mean that if any one single Category gets more than 300 shows it may start to slow down only when that actual category is accessed in the guide?

Just curious as to whether the truly archived shows need to be marked as not "public" by DVArchive in order to not overload the guide reading process?

[Scallica]

I saw a Seagate 300GB hard drive in Best Buy. Has anyone had any experiences with a drive of this size in their RTV?

-Scallica-

[rm -rf *.*]

Originally posted by theviss
Thanks all.

Sounds like it does not matter what manufacturer.


Such is not the case.

RTV-5k's/55xx's are not compatable with Samsung brand drives. (RTV does not recognise/see the drive)

RTV-5k/55xx's also fail to recogjnize the Hitachi 400Gb drives (no problems seeing the Hitachi 300Gb though)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Scallia -

The Seagate 300Gb drive should work fine in the 4k/45xx's and also 5k/55xx's. I don't recall seeing / hearing any reports of problems w/ the Seagate 300Gb HDD and RTV-5k/55xx's (or 4k's/45xx's for that matter)

[newbeetle18t]

Originally posted by Scallica
I saw a Seagate 300GB hard drive in Best Buy. Has anyone had any experiences with a drive of this size in their RTV?

-Scallica-

Just installed one in a 5040 and is working flawlessly for over a week.

I'm new to the 50xx series so I really don't have a comparison to any others.

I must warn you if you plan on doing a low level format on the drive before using RTVpatch give yourself plenty of time.

It took about 22 hours for the LLF to complete!!

[BoulderGeek]

After installing the WD 250GB drive the other week, I switched my default record to High Quality. I found (and I could just be imagining it) that High quality tends to provide much more vibrant colors, and not just when I'm tripping, either!

My machine didn't slow down at all with the 250GB drive (formats down to 238GB). If anything, it got slightly snappier (8MB cache and 7200 RPM drive now). I certainly don't need a 400GB drive. I am using DVArchive (though I found I have to switch to static IP addresses now, since when DHCP addresses change, DVArchive barfs and wont serve properly).

All I wanted was roughly 100 hours online at the best quality I can get. I think I now have it, with about 110 hours available if all is on High. Things I don't care about are still done in medium if they won't benefit from High quality. So, I think with my practices, I have about 150 hours onteh Replay, with 120GB on teh DVArchive backend.

There is definitely something to be said for using a modern drive in teh Replay to drop noise from teh OEM drive. As I've complained before, that Maxtor 80GB OEM drive has the noisiest seek I've heard since 1990 full-height SCSI drives.

[BaysideBas]

Originally posted by newbeetle18t
I must warn you if you plan on doing a low level format on the drive before using RTVpatch give yourself plenty of time.
There's absolutely no reason to do this on a new drive as it's done at the factory. And it's iffy at best if a used drive isn't showing signs of disc problems.

[rm -rf *.*]

Originally posted by newbeetle18t
Just installed one in a 5040 and is working flawlessly for over a week.

I'm new to the 50xx series so I really don't have a comparison to any others.

I must warn you if you plan on doing a low level format on the drive before using RTVpatch give yourself plenty of time.

It took about 22 hours for the LLF to complete!!
There's no need (or reason, for that matter) to low-level format a brand new drive. Aside from the name, today's low level format bears almost no resemblance to the original low level format utility from the early years. For the most part, all the modern LLF does is "erase" all data on the drive by writing a continuous string of zero's from the first sector of the drive to the last sector on the drive. The drives are already blank coming from the manufacturer, since the final step of the test & verification procedure is to LLF the drive. After that, it's bagged, boxed, taged and shipped.

[plyons10]

Yes.. yes... we all understand that. But should we low level format new drives before we patch them?

[rickster]

Originally posted by mhargr03
do you find that after about 400 GB or so access from the Replays to the DVA Server slows up due to the huge amount of guide data to load? Yes. And no...

It's much more a function of the number of guide entries than the number of gigabytes.

I've solved the problem by installing several instances of DVA on my DVA server. Five instances in fact, one for each of several general categories - Movies, Sports etc.

There are a few tricks to doing it:
- each instance needs to have a different IP address (so you need to bind multiple IPs to the network adapter on your DVA server)
- each instance needs to have a separate store for its xmls.

Do a search for "instances" on the DVA forum at dvarchive.org - lots of how-tos on the subject. (Although it was a little difficult to discover how to bind multiple IPs to one adapter under WinXP; let me know if you need help with that.)

Rick