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Ultimate TV (UTV) Hard Drive Upgrade
BubbaJoeBob writes: "I just read this thread over at the AVSForum that jeffm7 was able to upgrade his UTV 40GB drive to a WD 100GB drive. Other users are reporting that they were also successful using the WD 120GB drive." And aside from ending up with an apparently useless original drive, this sounds much less painful and involved than various homebrewed TiVO upgrades; according to posters on this thread, it's nearly plug-and-play (with a necessary download step in the middle).
Actually, maxtor has a drive utility to change the loudness of the drive. This will have a small impact on the performance (probably won't make much of a difference when used by a tivo), but from what it sounds, that'd be worthwhile. You'd have to put it in your computer and run the utility, but it's probably worthwhile. See noise utilities for ibm and maxtor drives.
Found it... and in deference to the Fora in which I found this information, I am summarizing it (thereby hoping to avoid the /. effect on their site.)
The TiVo's OS is a Linux variant, one that allegedly assumes 512 byte sectors. This gives a 128 GiB (2^30) of storage per drive.
I think that this works out to over 310-320 hours(assuming 8.75/7 h / GiB), or just under TWO weeks straight of a single channel.
Just imagine all the Simpsons / Family Guy / Jackass episodes that would be! Not to mention all the HBO-only specials...
I can't imagine making it this easy to "pirate" the more expensive hardware.
It's not pirating though. The user is purchasing another, more expensive drive to replace the old one and in the process are probably voiding their warrantee.
The companies could probably legally prevent usage of their network with user modified hardware and certainly void any warrantee, though I doubt they would bother pursuing more money from a unit they would rather no longer support.
I imagine requesting more money for a user upgraded unit, would be like condoning user upgrades and validating them as still being supported units. Easier to just void them, rather than project an image that this practice is almost acceptable from their point of view.
Not everyone observes anti-static and electrical precautions and since the unit is not designed to be user upgradable, their legal eagles probably would have a fit at the thought of supporting the unknown. If they had thorough, easy to understand step by step instructions for user upgrades and the hardware was designed to make it easy, then it could be a different story.
Don't get me wrong though, if I had a TiVo, I would love to drop in a couple of 120Gb drives. Actually, I would rather have a network capable unit that I could just sym link to my NFS server, especially if I could have this as combined storage for multiple units around the house. Of course, I'm dreaming a bit here, I don't know if this is possible with any of them.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I'm not too sure about Linux, but I remember in DOS, you could use the debug.com utility to call a memory address in the disk controller (albeit for SCSI and MFM only) that would invoke a low level format utility. I'm not sure if it exists/works anymore.
All this applies only to the TiVo, which are the only PVRs I have experience with.
Faster drives are contraindicated due to the heat that the drives give off. The extra speed doesn't help the TiVo write or read the mpeg data on the HD, and wouldn't help anyway.
The bottleneck's the processor and lack of RAM (PPC603, and 16MB, IIRC), and, of course, the lack of a second tuner.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
in DOS, you could use the debug.com
What a blast from the past! I remember that. Yeah like 4 or 5 bytes and then whoosh!
That calls a system BIOS program to do the dirty work does'nt it?
I used to actually enjoy typing in debug listings from magazines like Compute!, to muck around with the utils, etc. I remember a util called prune that was a deltree before the days of DOS deltree, which did a great job of pruning dirs and also fucking up file systems every now and then. : ) I guess thats what you get with 50 byte programs without error checking. ; )
Before that though, I was even sicker, back when Compute! mag was a C64 magazine, they had literally pages and pages of multi column HEX listings for utils and games. Some of the games were actually pretty good arcade games, considering thier size. First you had to type in the assembler in BASIC (really just a check summing program) and save it (to tape for me), then use it to enter the HEX listings, the "assembler" could inform you when you got a line wrong, based on the checksum.
Man those were the days.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?