The Verdict

12:00 - Sunday 7 March 2004 by THG Reporting Team
Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: life, offline, weaknees

The Verdict

Ad

I wish I could say that there was a completely happy ending, but alas, it was not to be. Later that evening as I shut off the TV in preparation for bed, I heard a clicking sound from the TiVo that hadn't been there before the upgrade. I first thought it might be a temporarly effect of the upgrade, but it was still there the next morning and after a few days, it seemed like it was here to stay.

I again hit Google to see if there were any other cases of clicking TiVos and found plenty of references - to Maxtor drives in particular. The noise comes from head seeking and can many times be eliminated by using

Since I had a favorable impression of Weaknees' commitment to customer service from their website and postings in the Tivo Community forums, I was surprised and disappointed by my email exchanges with them. Though their responses were always swift, they were generally unsatisfying. I won't bore you with the details, but I was left with the impression that, at worst, Weakness felt that I was trying to scam them for a new drive or, at best, that I was incapable of performing basic troubleshooting.

But the worst part was that I found that I was left between the proverbial rock and hard place. Because of the way that TiVo's file system works - at least according to Weaknees support - the main and expansion drives are seen as one large drive. This meant that the only way I could get a replacement drive - if Weaknees agreed that their drive was at fault - was to return both my original drive and the expansion drive to Weaknees for "reformatting".

Though Weaknees finally said they'd replace their drive at no cost - if they (again) determined that their drive was, in fact, at fault - I decided to live with the problem for the time being, rather than face losing the content on the drives. And yes, I did try the AMSET utility, only to find that the drive was already set to its most silent "quiet" mode.

My bottom line is that I still feel that the Weaknees upgrade is worth the $50 or so that I might have saved by doing it myself (Option 4 in Table 1), especially since everything I needed was in the kit - including the IDE and power splitter cables - the instructions were excellent, and I didn't have to mess with preparing a new drive for TiVo use.

Tip: If you're really a die-hard DIYer, Hinsdale's How-To TiVo upgrade page is pretty much the definitive (and free) guide.

But I sure wish Weakness' quality control were better and had kept the clicking drive out of my TiVo, because I really don't like to listen to the little guy working its program capture magic.

Table 1: Upgrade options

Option 1: Hughes SD-DVR120 - 100 hrs

 $350
Option 2: Weaknees factory upgraded - 105 hrs
Hughes SD-DVR40 (one 120GB drive)		 $299
Option 3: DIY w/ Weaknees kit - 108 hrs
Hughes SD-DVR40 + 80GB Weaknees kit		 $249
($100 + $149)
Option 4: DIY - 108 hrs
Hughes SD-DVR40 + 80GB drive + Weaknees "Twinbreeze" bracket		 $200
($100 + $70 + $30)

Ad
Talkback
Google Ads
Ad
The Miscellaneous Articles and reviews
News
Reviews
Videos