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Want to upgrade Series 3 (again...)

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  • #1

    Want to upgrade Series 3 (again...)

    I bought a new Tivo Series 3 from Weaknees about 3 years ago that came with a 750GB drive already installed (instead of the 300GB drive that was stanadard.) At the time that was the largest drive on the market.

    Now with drives so dirt cheap, and with the wife recording everything in site I find it's time to upgrade again.

    I found some Western Digital 2TB drives on sale at Newegg, and since I needed to add storage to the Windows Home Server I picked up an extra one for the Tivo.

    I've heard that this is not a good position to be in... Upgrading a previously upgraded Tivo is complicated, and the original Series 3 don't support the 2TB drives (it's a WD Green WD20EARS 64MB cache model.)

    Any suggestions where to proceed from here?

    I have a Thermaltake 2-bay external eSATA docking station that makes it really easy to hook two SATA drives to my PC, and I have no technical problems taking the 750GB drive out and reinstalling it.

    I'd like to avoid a 1 drive internal and 1 drive eSATA final solution for the Tivo, because as a storage specialist I realize that simply doubles the chance for a drive failure in the future losing all of my data.

    Oh yeah, of course the wife wants to keep all of her existing Season Passes and programming during the upgrade.

    Anyone have some bright ideas on where I go from here?

    Thanks in advance,

    Stephen
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  • #2
    We can do a copy from that 750 to a 1 TB, and then add another 1 TB external. But there's just no way to go to a 2 TB for that unit, technically.
    Been here a long time . . .

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    • #3
      Originally posted by WK-Michael View Post
      We can do a copy from that 750 to a 1 TB, and then add another 1 TB external. But there's just no way to go to a 2 TB for that unit, technically.
      That's perfectly fair and reasonable.

      Option A: How about me just adding a external 1TB eSATA drive? I know that since the internal drive isn't the original drive that something needs to happen to get the Tivo to use the external drive also.

      Option B is to just go for a Tivo Premier (and pay $199 for another lifetime service agreement) and replace its drive with the 2TB WD.

      Just curious: I know that heat is the #1 leading cause of HDD failures, so that's why I got the relatively low-performing WD Green 2TB drive. Is it still up to the task of running in a Tivo though?

      Thanks,

      Stephen

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      • #4
        You can use an external 1TB eSATA, but we'd need to get the TiVo here.

        We recommend DVR drives exclusively; the drive you bought is likely a Desktop GP drive from WD. Not ideal, but it would technically work.

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        • #5
          A - You can't do that. The TiVo won't recognize the drive. We'd have to do it here:

          http://www.weaknees.com/misc.php

          B - I think it would be $299, but that's a good option also.

          We use the WD 2 TB Green Power drives here, but in AV versions. They're fine.
          Been here a long time . . .

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