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Video Storage And Hard Drive Manufacturers
IrateSurf writes "A new column posted over at the Storage Supersite questions whether or not PVRs (Personal Video Recorders) are good for the hard drive industry. It's interesting, considering topics like whether the noise of a hard drive is worse than a VCR. The discussion is a response to an earlier column talking about the bad market for hard drive makers."
I get more noise from the whine when MediaT&Comcast compress their digital cable poorly, resulting in a high-pitched whine coming out of the audio of some stations (FoodTV for one, makes watching Good Eats a bit annoying).
Then again, I have my Tivo sitting behind a piece of glass that makes up the entertainment center. But even with the door open, it's hard to hear the drive, and I've got an un-modded Tivo.
I know it would never happen, but I'd like a DVD player that had a hard drive with space to cache say 10-15 of the most recently watched films so I didn't have to wait for menus and swap disks.
Even if the hardware "expired" a copy after a week or so (to prevent permanent copies of rented films) it would still be useful.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
In reality what I really want IS just a glorified VCR. I don't want to have to pay monthly fees for their service. I don't want to record every instance of "Whose Line..." available - I really only want the one that's on once a week at a particular time. I don't want TiVo (or ReplayTV, or whoever) to tell my machine to occasionally record things I haven't asked for, whether its because of their attempts at marketing or a lame attempt at "profiling" my viewing habits. I don't want these companies using my viewing habits for their gain, even if its anonymous and aggregate. But the PVR manufacturers seem hell-bent on only letting you use their device if you pay their monthly fee for their "service".
Until this is addressed, I'll just keep rotating tapes in my VCR.
#DeleteChrome
If you want to reduce noise, use 2.5" drives at lower rpms. Yeah, they're a bit more expensive. But I daresay that a pair of 30GB notebook drives would make a PVR whisper quiet without significantly impacting performance. Smaller unit too, though I suspect size will remain pretty constant even when space isn't really an issue. Crack open your VCR sometime to check out the wasted space.