Re: Media Center Vs Tivo On Engadget
Sorry that you had such bad luck with your Tivos. I do consider myself lucky, especially when reading some of the horror stories people posted on Tivo forums. I was always amazed that people were having such bad luck when all of my Tivos were humming along just fine. Then again, how often do you see people rave about a product vs. giving it a bad rap when things start going south? I hacked every Tivo I ever owned, and that included updating the software with patches as well as adding more storage. I don’t know if that had any bearing on their lifespan, but you never know.
Tivo actually had several different hard drive manufacturers that they used for their products. The original Tivos used Quantum drives which were eventually supplanted with Maxtor and Western Digitals. It all depended on what they had on hand when your particular Tivo was being built.
Perhaps the fact that I replaced most of the OEM drives with bigger drives had something to do with my higher success rate. Then again, many of the Tivos I upgraded simply included the addition of a 2nd drive along with the original drive and they all worked perfectly for years. I used a UPS that had voltage regulation with all of my Tivos, which no doubt was beneficial to their longevity. It could be a reason why your Tivos had so many power supply failures.
If you live in an area that suffers from wide variations in line voltages or a lot of voltage spikes then the Tivo power supplies probably fell victim to your power company more than any manufacturing issues. It could also account for your high rate of card reader failures. I learned a long time ago that having stable line voltage is about the best thing you can do for your A/V electronics.
It seemed that most people that had bad luck with Tivos always had multiple issues with more than one unit, like they were being singled out to get the lemons.