Aldi - Technosonic PVR £99.99 - Freeview

dc

Lorian wrote:

Someone sent me a photo recently. I'll post it up later.

The HD appears to be a standard IDE drive. Changing it would, I'm sure, invalidate the warranty!

The hard drive is a quality Western Digital 7200rpm IDE which retails around £35, afaik the software may limit drive to a max of 160gig. It will invalidate G'tee tho to change

HTHs dc

Lorian

The photo is on the blog you'll need to scroll down a bit.

AIRFORCE_2

Lorian wrote:

Which transmitter area are you in?

Sorry for the delay -- just had a quick duty free run to the costas.

I'm on the Waltham transmitter - (East Midlands).

While Ive been away the recordings that I set all appear to have recorded OK.
I'll let you know if there were any problems.

Like many of us using this forum I, too, think that the PVR101 is a great looking box and, potentially the best value for money going, for a PVR. I will continue to use it until something drastic goes wrong.

scoobie

dc wrote:

The hard drive is a quality Western Digital 7200rpm IDE which retails around £35, afaik the software may limit drive to a max of 160gig. It will invalidate G'tee tho to change

HTHs dc

Anyone going to give it a try?
Out of interest why would it limit it to 160gb and not 80gb?

Welshman

Hi all, I have tried a 160 Gig HDD and the software limitation is a little over 131 Gigs, I don't know if the 1.2 update will change this.

Another factor to be taken into consideration is the PSU, the WD800 Caviar drive that is fitted is quite a low current device i.e. 5V 0.35A and 12V 0.50A this means 7.75 Watts in total.

Rgds, Welshman

carfrog

Many Thanks to Lorian, DC and Welshman for the info and pics. Stupid question but when you fitted the 160 wd did the lid fit securely and did you bench test for temp etc.
Carfrog

Welshman

carfrog wrote:

Many Thanks to Lorian, DC and Welshman for the info and pics. Stupid question but when you fitted the 160 wd did the lid fit securely and did you bench test for temp etc.
Carfrog

I have changed the HDD for a 120gig Seagate ST3120814A as this drive is fairly low power, just over 8watts total, this drive has been in the PVR101 for almost 4 weeks without any problems, there are no overheating problems with this HDD.

You also ask 'did the lid fit securely' if you look at the picture on Lorian's site you will see that the original HDD has plenty of room in side the box, there is nothing else in the center of the box, as all 3.5 inch drives are all the same size these days there is no problem.

At the moment there is no point in using a 160 Gig HDD because of the 131 Gig limitation, this may be a limitation of the IDE driver chip or maybe just the software, we will have to wait for the update and then I will test a larger HDD

Rgds, Welshman..

Lorian

IF I was going out specifically to procure a new disk for the unit (which I'm not, yet!) It would also be worth looking at samsung spinpoint disks as they are really quiet, run cool and have a 3 year warranty.

Welshman

Lorian wrote:

IF I was going out specifically to procure a new disk for the unit (which I'm not, yet!) It would also be worth looking at samsung spinpoint disks as they are really quiet, run cool and have a 3 year warranty.

I agree with you about Samsung drives, I have not yet had to replace a Samsung drive (yet) in my opinion the Drives to avoid are Maxtor and Fujitsu, I have had to replace many Maxtor drives and a few Fujitsu drives.

I have been using a low noise 160 Gig Seagate drive in my DreamBox 7000s for a couple of years with no problems.

Rgds, Welshman..

dc

I've been tempted re Dreambox, any MSE pointers for doing it on the cheap, wrt box and Cams?


dc