[mythtv-users] 0.22 annoyances

f-myth-users at media.mit.edu f-myth-users at media.mit.edu
Thu Dec 31 21:02:17 UTC 2009


    > Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:18:05 -0600
    > From: David Engel <david at istwok.net>

    > On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 09:45:48AM -0800, Paul Bender wrote:
    > > On 12/31/2009 9:08 AM, David Engel wrote:
    > > >Sidenote: that TiVo I started with is now 9.5 years old and still
    > > >going strong in daily use by my Mom.
    > > 
    > > I am surprised that it has continued for so long. When one of the

    > So am I!  To be completely transparent, it *is* on it's third (maybe
    > even fourth) add-on drive.  The original 30DB drive is still working,
    > though.  The biggest surprise is that the modem still works.  As I
    > recall, the modem was the most common component to fail on series 1
    > boxes and usually did in less than 3 years.

I have a Series 1 (won during an essay contest in an initial promotion
of the entire concept, back in the late 90's sometime) whose modem
never failed.  Maybe 2-3? years ago I -finally- configured the TivoNet
card that had been sitting in it for years to use my Ethernet for
listings data, since I was planning to drop my last analog line.  Its
original disk never failed.  It was replaced fairly early on with
Maxtors which failed 6? 7? times across two disks (virtually -always-
the A drive, e.g. the one that always had constant head motion because
of Tivo's constant circular buffer and because the entire system & DB
is also on the A drive) in maybe 2.5-3 years.  (Memory fails, thank
god.)  I threw away my investment in those (RMA'ing 2 drives 6 times
is ridiculous) and replaced them with Seagates, which have never
failed. (*)  At least none of the Maxtor failures actually lost
data---every time, I was able to dd the data to a replacement drive;
only once (I think) did the Tivo even go into its green-screen-of-fsck
to fix things up.  [I might have lost a few seconds of a recording or
something.]

Unfortunately, it lost all of its analog sources when analog
broadcasting died and when analog on the cable died.  So now it's
still sitting there, still with some recordings I should do something
with, but no way to get new content, since I don't feel like going
through the annoyance of buying & configuring some new hardware when
Myth's doing everything else.

(*) So basically nothing in it has -ever- failed, except for the
Maxtor replacement drives I put in it to increase its capacity, and
which caused me to write off Maxtor forever.  (That, and a -desktop-
which had been sitting virtually unusued for 6? months and had a
brand-new Maxtor in it that -also- die due to click-of-death.)  Pity
that Seagate acquired Maxtor and that some of their recent drives
acquired the same bad-repution-inducing behavior, too.  Alas.

Sturdy little box.


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