AltEPG

Hi

I am thinking of taking the opportunity of upgrading my hard drive with the advent of the new altepg. Before I do I wanted to know if theere is any limit to the size of hard drive I can use (I have a cachecard so, while I am aware menus may become sluggish with a lot of recordings, I hope the cachecard will help).

Thanks!

Me too.

I have two 120gb drive and they are both about 8 years old.


Any recommendations? 500GB? 2 x 2TB?

I'd stick to 1TB max for now - there is an MFS limit at 1.5TB, not sure if that's been overcome in recent mfstools or not.

Thanks, off to the shops tomorrow for me then!

An interesting recent post on this can be found at http://dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63966 (at last we can mention that dark and shadowy place as we are not discussing this over on the tivocommunity forum).

tivo4mevo tivo4mevo is offline
Senior Member
Join Date: Nov 2004
Posts: 356

I was mistaken about 2), it wasn't a limitation of tivoapp, but of the Apple Partition Map (APM). From its wikipedia page:
Quote:
Because APM allows 32 bits worth of logical blocks, the size of an APM formated disk is limited to 2 TiB
So that's a per disk limitation. I believe that MFSlive (and potentially the mfs_tools) supported adding an external drive, to reach a combined maximum of 4TiB (two disks).

Although that post is in respect of the US Series 3 machines the same principles probably apply on an S1 with a hacked kernel. So it seems like using a 2TB drive is feasible with some specialist work. This is roughly 700 hour of Tivo recording time at Best quality.

I don't know how much significantly slower this would make the Tivo Now Playing interface than it is at 613 hours at Basic with 500GB of hard drive space. To be honest even with a Cachecard and 512MB RAM 613 hours is a lot slower than I would ideally like for any file operations like moving up and down Now Playing or deleting a recording. Fortunately Play and Fast Forward and Rewind still respond instantly even with this many hours of recording capacity on the Tivo.

I don't know if in Mode 0 the recording bitrate could perhaps be ramped up even higher than the standard settings for Modeo 0 so that a 2Tb drive merely meant even better recording quality rather than a horribly slow Tivo.

But to all practical intents and purposes the capacity of the latest high capacity SATA drives is now beginning to outstrip the ability of the Tivo S1 operating system and more especially its hardware to satisfactorily take advantage of it.

I don't know if in Mode 0 the recording bitrate could perhaps be ramped up even higher than the standard settings for Modeo 0 so that a 2Tb drive merely meant even better recording quality rather than a horribly slow

I doubt you'd see any improvement, even if the ancient chipset could support a higher encoding rate. It's diminishing returns after a certain point; even Mode 0 recordings are significantly larger in size than the source data stream IIRC.

Next daft question:

When I took my original 40gb drive out, I copied it to a 120Gb and then added a second 120Gb drive.

Could I have 2x 1Gb (or 2x 1.5Gb) HDDs with the new AltEPG image?

I'll have to hunt the instructions. I seem to think it had something to do with "Gary Sargeant"?

Am I being daft suggesting it as I'm increasing my massive TiVo capacity from 240Mb to 1024Mb?

You can only do so many upgrades on a data set, and I think having done three already you may be stuck, but a proper expert will doubtless advise.

Could I have 2x 1Gb (or 2x 1.5Gb) HDDs with the new AltEPG image?

I presume you mean Terrabytes rather than Gigabytes (Sorry I do have to fight the pedant in me occaisionally ).