A Penguin in the Orchard

Hard Drive Week

It’s officially hard drive week at the Steidler-Dennison household.

I replaced a dead old 40 GB drive in my main Ubunutu machine on Saturday. I swapped 40 GB for 160, bringing the total storage on the machine to 400 GB. That’s important, because it shares drives via NFS with the other computers on the home network. That replacement was a bit frantic, as I was right in the middle of putting out The Roadhouse for the week. but it was really eased by Ubuntu. The install was freakin’ beautiful. I may write more about it on my dad’s site, at GeekTimeLinux.

Prior to that failure, the TiVo in the living room had started to flake. When using it, either in playback or for live TV, the picture would freeze, then pixellate, then be fine for a few minutes. Or, it would just pause. Restarting the player had no long-term effect, though it did seem to clear the problem for a short while. I searched through the TiVo forums (which are excellent, by the way) and everything indicated that the hard drive was failing. This was a low-end 40 hour machine, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to upgrade.

Also in the forums, I found some recommendations for Weaknees.com. They specialize in TiVo upgrades and replacements. They provide drives pre-installed with the TiVo software to add to existing storage or to replace failing drives. Perfect. I ordered a 160 GB drive, which arrived yesterday.

It’s still easy sometimes to confuse capability with hardware. When I cracked open the TiVo box last night, it was surprising to see how little there actually is to these great devices. A motherboard, a tuner, a power supply, and a hard drive. The box actually had more space than hardware. The Weaknees instructions were letter-perfect and very detailed. While I didn’t necessarily need them, I did follow them precisely. Weaknees even provided the two wrenches necessary to take the cover off the TiVo. Less than 20 minutes after removing the new drive from the shipping box, I was plugging the TiVo back in and walking through the guided setup. I couldn’t recommend Weaknees any more emphatically.

It’s remarkable that a company could provide all that Weaknees did at the price. It’s a sign of the real value of Linux. If these drives utilized a Windows-based operating system, they’d be much more expensive and far less reliable. I’ve had that experience with a Dish Network PVR that required rebooting every few days. I’m really glad to be able to keep our home entertainment devices within the Linux family.
It feels like a TV bonanza to go from 40 hours of storage to 187. I can now start to use the “recommend” features in the unit without worry that I’ll take up space my wife needs for all her shows. We more than doubled the capacity at the high-quality setting, as well. I do TiVo some sports events (boxing, mostly), and they’ve always looked horrible in the higher-capacity recordings. I’ll spend some time perusing the guide in the next few weeks, rating thumbs-up or thumbs-down and watch how closely the TiVo gets to my viewing tastes.

A pretty good week for storage, all in all.

[tags]Ubuntu, TiVo, Linux, Weaknees[/tags]