WD AV-GP 1 TB AV Video Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EURX

My TiVo HD DVR got to the point where I often found recorded shows in pieces because the darn thing rebooted itself in the middle of recording, leaving me with two recordings and a 12 minute gap in between (for one hour shows). Its frequent reboots interrupted viewing. Researching online, it became clear to me that the hard drive was dying.After finding instructions online at Engadget and TiVoCommunity for how to replace the hard drive and transfer all my recordings from the original TiVo hard drive, I was all set to buy a Seagate drive. Then I learned that there actually is a difference among drives, and this Western Digital AV-GP WD10EURX one is designed for DVRs. While I might not think much of a noisy Seagate drive in my computer, I don't want a noisy hard drive in an appliance in my living room. According to a TiVoCommunity forum posting, WD AV-GP drives rate a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is the quietest.Also, these drives are designed for continuous operation 24/7 with the intent that the data they are moving is video that you are watching, so they don't split up the bytes and move them in the random ways that regular data gets transferred.One concern I had is that the original TiVo HD 160 GB drive ran at 5400 rpm and this new WD10EURX 1 TB drive runs at 7200 rpm so would the faster drive get hotter and since the TiVo HD was only designed to cool the 5400 rpm drive, would this be a problem? The answer is no. These WD AV-GP drives are "green" emitting low heat so they can easily replace the original drive without an issue.The TiVoCommunity forum posting was last updated about 5 years ago, so its description of running WinMFS, the required tool for preparing hard drives for TiVo usage, only goes up to Windows Vista, so I can add that it works with Windows 7, just right-click on WinMFS.exe and run as administrator.The forum posting warns against WD AV-GP drives saying that they can't be rebooted and will just hang. The only solution then is to unplug the power cord in the back of the TiVo and then plug it back in. This is no longer true. Western Digital must have heard about the problem and fixed it, because I was able to use the restart option from the TiVo menu to test this, and sure enough, the TiVo restarted. I did not need to unplug and replug the unit. I did not need to run the wdidle3 workaround program.After the upgrade, I went from 21 HD / 184 SD hours recording capacity to 157 HD / 1,367 SD hours. Plus, all my recordings transferred from the old drive to the new one since I ran the MFSCOPY command via the WinMFS GUI.Below are some URLs where I pieced together the information to perform the upgrade (I hope these links remain in my comments, not sure if Amazon will remove them):http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=370784#S5http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/17/how-to-upgrade-your-tivo-hd-with-winmfs/

Our TiVo Premiere has started having some problems the past few months: random reboots, lock ups, glitches in the recordings, etc. When it hung up while my wife was watching one of her favorite shows and finally responded a few minutes later in the recording, I started to consider that the hard drive may be failing. It just seemed like the box was trying to read part of the disk and having failures, eventually moved on to a part of the disk it could read. I did some research on how to check the hard drive from the diagnostics menu, and sure enough, the test had failures almost immediately.After talking to TiVo about my options on getting the hard drive replaced ($350: $150 for a refurbished TiVo Premiere and $200 to transfer my Lifetime subscription) I decided to look into doing it myself. Do yourself a favor and search for "Ross Walker's Guide to Upgrading your TiVo" on the internet. Ross has captured, in exhaustive detail, the process of upgrading hard drives in most of the various TiVo models out there. Following his instructions was extremely easy and for the cost of a new drive and a couple of Torx screwdrivers, my TiVo Premiere continues to keep on working and now has triple the original recording capacity.As with all of my hard drive reviews, I will update if and when the drive fails. However, so far, so good!

Because this series of WD disks is made to operate in high temperature environments such as video recorders it should last longer than a typical hard disk, and based on many reviews by others on several sites it seems to be delivering the goods for a comparable price as a conventional disk. For this advantage the sole disadvantage for some applications is that the access time is a little slower than, say, an internal system disk, but that's a small price to pay for most other applications where speed is more dependent on continuous read or write times. I also note there are other models up to at least 4 TB at reasonable prices. Access time is the only reason for the four stars rather than five.

I purchased this drive as a replacement for a failing 750 gig Seagate DB35. I had been getting corrupted recordings, and random reboots on my Tivo HD for several weeks, so found my way into the HD diagnostics menu (kickstart code 54) and found that the HD was getting bad sectors. Unfortunately, this is because Tivo in their infinite wisdom, buffers live video to the HD 24/7, so after 4 years, this HD was dying.I backed up my recordings (all 600+ GB worth) onto my PC, performed a truncated backup, restored the backup to the new drive, and replaced the failing drive with this WD 1 TB drive. And unlike earlier WD drives that I'd read about, this one did not require any adjustments to the spin down function.Once the Tivo ran some mysterious tests on the new drive for 3+ hours, it came right up. It now shows 157 HD hours available on the new drive.Just last night, I stress tested the new drive by recording 2 HD programs, transferred a third back from my PC and watched a fourth HD prerecorded program - that's 4 HD streams at once. It performed without any problems.

It's an old TIVO but it now works like new.After many years of use my TIVO started to respond slowly, but it was out of warranty. The only moving part is the HDD, so I took a chance and replaced it with the WD AV-GP 1 TB, 64 MB Cache. The TIVO works like new or better; it has been a long time and I just do not remember how it ran when new. This HDD almost did not fit in the case, I had to install it upside down. The WD AV-GP 1 TB runs silent, no vibration, no clicks.I chose this HDD because of the large Cache, low Amazon price and the "drive leveling". I realize that there is a large unused partition, the TIVO still has the same amount of recording space. If I could have found a 200 GB HDD with the same specifications and lower price I would have bought it.