It's been a long road... (flicker flicker)

[dotdot]

And .... I'm hanging on it seems by a thread.
So.. I have an S1 lifetime - with .. yet another drive installed (kindly provided by a V helpful member here a few years back).

My tivo everyonce in a while exhibits the following.
screen goes black.. for a second or two... this then increases in frequency until i simply turn the whole box off for a few hours.
I'm not keen on doing this ... following a drive death a few years back (click click... death..)
When i turn it back on it .... is all fine again ... for perhaps 6/9 months..

Have any of you seen this or know what the cause of this might be ?

I think i'm going to be in need of another drive soon... so i have another Q.
Has anyone manage to get a S1 working with an SSD ? Given it's a streaming write... is HDD (1TB) still the best solution ? (any solution that works in enough for me).

All the best

..

[Pegasus]

That's a new one on me. Does it clear if you do a 'restart the recorder' (i.e. a 'warm' restart) rather than switching-off-and-on again?


With modern drives I would be planning for failure after say 3-4 years. Maybe a little longer with ours as we leave them on all the time (as you point out, it is the turning off and on that causes high wear - better to leave them on 24/7!)

Personally I wouldn't use a SSD. TiVo is continually writing the 'live tv' buffer which causes work for the SSD (you can feel them get warm sometimes). SSD cells are only designed to be written a certain number of times and then they are pre-emptively marked as dead by the SSD controller. Of course the cell might not have failed for years yet but the controller offlines it anyway. Eventually you run out of cells and the disk dies. However a HDD will happily write to the same piece of oxide until it definitely croaks.

And when an SSD croaks then that's it - the whole thing has gone. No chance to even salvage bits of it (or put it in the fridge etc). And they go without warning. I had my laptop SSD go a while ago and there was no warning at all - it just failed one morning when I switched the laptop on. Game over.


1.5TB is the absolute max size in our TiVo S1. So I would stick with 1TB - there's plenty around and they're cheap as chips at the moment. (You don't need mega-high spec disks as the TiVo uses 20-year old technology so figures for huge write speeds are meaningless.)

[moonchalk]

I'd strongly recommend trying a replacement power supply if you can find one before condemning the disks.

I just cannabalized all my TiVo bits into 3 working machines after realizing that most of the problems with sound and video I was experiencing were down to broken power supplies and not motherboard, cabling or drive failures

Takes time swapping stuff around and testing but I'm glad I did.

With three working and cloned series 1's I'll probably be one of the last TiVo 1's standing here in future