Recording Time
From TivoZA
The amount of hours worth of shows your TiVo can record depends on how big a hard drive you have in your TiVo. The Series 1 units were limited to a 137GB hard drive but the TivoZA image includes a patched kernel that enables the TiVo to see disk space above 137GB, so as long as it's an IDE harddrive (i.e. not SATA or SCSI) you should be able to install it in your TiVo. One further thing to note is that it's possible to install two hard drives into a TiVo, installing two Seagate DB35 750GB (http://www.seagate.com/products/consumer_electronics/db35series.html) drives would give you 525 hours of recording time at best quality or 1800 hours at basic quality.
The standard TiVo Series 1 units ship with the following drive configurations:
| Type | Harddisk |
|---|---|
| Philips 14hr HDR112 | Single 13.6GB A drive |
| Philips 20hr HDR212 | Single 22GB A drive |
| Philips 30hr HDR312 | Dual 13.6GB A + 13.6GB B drive |
| Philips 30hr HDR31201/2/3/4 | Single 30GB A drive |
| Philips 60hr HDR612 | Dual 30GB A + 30GB B drive or Dual 40GB A + 20GB B drive |
| Sony 30hr SVR2000 | Single 30GB or 40GB A drive |
| Thompson PVR10UK (UK model) | Single 40GB A drive |
| TiVo PTV100 | Single 13.6GB A drive |
| TiVo PTV300 | Dual 13.6GB A + 13.6GB B drive |
Below is a table indicating how many hours you should be able to record, based on your hard drive size and the recording quality selected.
| HDD Size (GB) | Basic (hrs) | Medium (hrs) | High (hrs) | Best (hrs) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 750 | 900 | 525 | 375 | 262 |
| 500 | 600 | 350 | 250 | 175 |
| 400 | 480 | 280 | 216 | 140 |
| 300 | 360 | 210 | 150 | 100 |
| 240 | 288 | 168 | 129 | 84 |
| 200 | 240 | 140 | 108 | 70 |
| 160 | 192 | 112 | 86 | 56 |
| 120 | 144 | 84 | 64 | 42 |
| 80 | 96 | 56 | 43 | 28 |
| 60 | 72 | 42 | 30 | 21 |
| 40 | 48 | 28 | 21 | 14 |
| 30 | 36 | 21 | 15 | 10 |
| 22 | 26 | 15 | 11 | 8 |
| 13 | 16 | 9 | 7 | 5 |
If your hard drive is a different size to those listed above you can calculate its recording time using the following multipliers based on the recording quality selected.
| Quality | Factor |
|---|---|
| Basic | 1.2 x Drive Size (GB) |
| Medium | 0.7 x Drive Size (GB) |
| High | 0.5 x Drive Size (GB) |
| Best | 0.35 x Drive Size (GB) |
Dual drives
If you're considering getting two hard drives for your TiVo, there are a few things worth noting. Large hard drives (i.e. 250GB and above) tend to cause quite a power drain on the TiVo and having two drives the same make and model can cause problems. When using two drives of the same brand they'll power up at the same time causing a heavy load to be placed on the TiVo's power supply which may result in the unit failing to start. Getting two drives of different brands tends to solve this problem as their power up times will differ slightly and thus not cause a simultaneous power drain. If you do intend on using two large drives it may be worth investing in a PowerTrip (http://www.weaknees.com/powertrip.php), the PowerTrip staggers the power up of the second drive, preventing the simultaneous power drain. Using the PowerTrip you should be able to use any dual drive combination, no matter what the drive size, brand or model.
Lastly, the current TivoZA installer seems to have problems when restoring onto dual drives greater then 274GB. This can be fixed by using mfstools (http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/files.html) and specifying the "-r 4" parameter when using mfsrestore or mfsadd (the "Hinsdale How-to TiVo upgrade (http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html)" guide provides details on how to use mfstools). A further point to mention is that some users have had problems getting mfsrestore working properly on a large dual drive setup, the suggested method to get around this is to first perform mfsrestore on the primary drive and then perform mfsadd to extend the installation onto the second drive.
