Should I upgrade my own tivo, buy a prepared drive, or have someone do it for me?

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Should I upgrade my own tivo, buy a prepared drive, or have someone do it for me?

If you own a TiVo you've never upgraded but are considering it, and you've seen my writeup of my own upgrade process, and my review of a prepared drive installation, you are probably wondering what would work best for you. Before you can answer that question, a summary may help.

The DIY approach: You can go your own way

For my recently purchased Series 2 tivo (purchased for $199 - price still good until Thursday), I bought a bare 120Gb drive from newegg.com for $98, and an upgrade bracket and kit for $58. It took approximately 3 hours to complete the work, start to finish, including a couple hours wasted on research and trial and error, with about one hour of actual dismantling and rebuilding. The final product was a 188 hour TiVo at an upgrade cost of $156.

While the DIY upgrade may appear not for the faint of heart, if you've ever built your own PC you can definitely tackle this project. If you've worked with hard drive upgrades in PCs before and understand what master and slave jumpers are and what they do, you can totally do this.

The instructions that are out there are very detailed and easy to follow, and you can skip most of the tedious backup and restore steps. In reality, once I had my tivo opened up and the drive removed, I only had to connect up the two drives to my PC and run a single linux command from a bootable CD. The script was finished in a matter of seconds and the drives were prepared and ready to go.

I spent probably 15 minutes taking the TiVo apart initially, and putting the Twinbreeze kit in took another 30-45 minutes or so of reading detailed directions and piecing things together.

Middle ground: Someone does the icky PC stuff for you, you install

Your other option is to buy an upgrade drive ready to drop into your TiVo, and your task is simply to open it up, follow the supplied directions, and add the second drive. There is no shortage of small companies, websites, and professional hobbyists that offer this sort of package, including Weaknees, Hinsdale (the guy that wrote the upgrade how-to), TVrevo, 9th tee, among many others.

Looking at a few sites selling prepared drives, a 120Gb upgrade for my series 2 tivo will cost you $170 (replaces original drive only), $199, $229, or $189, depending on who you choose.

But what are you really paying for?

When you buy a prepared upgrade drive for your TiVo, you are essentially paying about double the price of a bare drive you could buy online. The dark secret of all these upgrade kits is basically that someone is sitting in an apartment running a program called BlessTiVo(scroll down to part 10, then configuration #1 to see the how-to on it). It's another single, one-line command from a bootable linux disk that takes seconds to complete. Then they tack on a $100 premium to the drive they bought for less than $100 and ship it off to you.

On the bright side, you're also paying for your valuable saved time. With most of these kits, all the steps that feel dangerous and cause nail-biting are handled by someone else. When your drive arrives, you pop open your tivo and put the new drive in, and you're done. In my DIY upgrade, I probably could have completed the drive install job in about a half hour.

I would even go so far as to say the Weaknees kit looks like the best deal of the lot, since they throw in their Twinbreeze kit. Where I paid $156 for my own drive and kit, they offer the same parts for $208 with the drive. If two hours of your time and some slight risk are worth more than $52 to you, the prepared drive and kit is a pretty good deal.

Do it for me: the clean hands approach

Most all the sites offering prepared upgrade drives also offer an upgrade service for those phobic to tivo tinkering. It's usually another $50 on top of other charges, and again, you're really paying someone to run a single command in linux and screw some drives in. I could imagine these guys getting the whole process down to maybe ten minutes with some practice. The main downside is that you have to give up TiVo for several days-to-a-week when you ship it off. The upside is aside from disconnecting your tivo and putting it into the mail, there's not much you have to do.

The cost for my TiVo upgrade done entirely by someone else would run $220 (replacing your original drive), $225, or $257.

The Verdict

Adding in my $199 cost of the TiVo, the bottom line is that my DIY upgrade cost me $355 and 3 hours of my time. If I went with an upgrade kit, the total cost would have been in the neighborhood of $400 and cost me about 30-60 minutes of time. If I would have paid someone else to do it all for me, it would cost about $425-450 and no TiVo for a week, which you can't really put a price on :). Before I set out to upgrade my TiVo, I would have guessed the price differences would be more pronounced, but keep in mind I bought an expensive kit that most TiVos do not require, so it could have been $50 less.

When weighing the options to determine what path you should take, the most important consideration is the cost of your time. If you're busy, pay someone else to do the time consuming bits for you. The second most important consideration is assessing your own level of technical expertise. If you've tinkered with PCs before, it shouldn't be any problem, but if you're new to digital gadgets you are probably better off paying someone to do it, and as you can see, it's not that much more expensive for a total upgrade service.

by Matt Haughey July 30, 2003 in Q & A

Comments

I finally decided (after reading every instructions set around) that I could upgrade my own. The only part that worried me was booting off the cd and getting the drive set-up right. Anyways, I'm well into the upgrade, just waiting on my drives to finish up. Then it's back into the tivo and hopefully success! This website has been a great tool.. probably never would have upgraded without it.
I'm upgrading my Series 2 60 hour Tivo. It looks drastically different on the inside, so i've taken lots of pictures for the site if they are wanted!

Posted by: regan at Jul 30, 2003 1:14:31 PM

I lied.
I'm having troubles making a bootable cd for my windows machine. I'm having to make it on my iBook and I can't figure out the right settings to burn it with or what program to use. I've tried disk copy and dragon burn, but I must be doing something wrong.
I've downloaded the mfs tools iso, do i burn the whole image? or just the linux folder as an image?

Posted by: regan at Jul 30, 2003 2:12:52 PM

Great write-up. I think you've really nailed it. One thing I'd add in terms of factors to consider is the practical aspect of tearing a PC apart to use as the backup/upgrade tool. I realize a lot of us seldom have the cover on our PCs :-), but if your PC is buried in a cabinet/desk or if you don't have much room to open it up, get at the IDE cables, and spread it all out somewhere, that's something else to consider.

Posted by: David Beckemeyer at Jul 30, 2003 2:14:32 PM

regan, since the MFS tools disk is an ISO, you should probably have no problem burning a disk with Toast. I've never burned an ISO on my mac without it, so I can't tell you if there are ways to do that. I do know making a bootable windows CD is a tad tricky, and whatever is in the ISO needs to be written to CDR exactly as it is.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Jul 30, 2003 2:44:24 PM

sorry to ask so many questions, but i'm stuck on getting the .iso burned properly. i know how to do it on a pc, but with a mac, i'm stuck. i have toast, but i can't figure out how to stop it from burning just a file and getting it to just burn the image. i'm sure there are just some special settings i'm missing in Toast. any help?

Posted by: regan at Jul 30, 2003 3:16:24 PM

I just fired up my copy of Toast 5.1.4 and clicking the "Other" button along the top, then dragging mfstools2noJ.iso over it recognizes it as an ISO 9660 bootable CD-ROM. I didn't burn it, but would guess it would work fine (it should).

If that doesn't work, you might want to try using the floppy version of it instead. Also, are you sure you've changed the boot sequence on your PC, so that it looks at the CDrom before booting from the hard disk?

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Jul 30, 2003 3:36:45 PM

oh my. i didn't notice that other was a drop-down menu. it was set-up for video cd with multiple mpegs and i thought that was the only option. i'm burning now and feel like this'll be successful, if not, i'm going to use the floppy. i've spent too long to quit now! =) Thanks for all your help Matt, I've been reading your blog for years.

Posted by: regan at Jul 30, 2003 3:38:25 PM

well, the floppy works, but i'm getting some grief from the commands. can anyone help? I tried running the command:
mfsadd -x /dev/hdb /dev/hdc but it did not work. i'm guessing that's because it tried my cd-rom since it's lined out at hdc. i've got my main tivo drive at hda my new drive at hdb and my cd-rom at hdc. i'm running the tools off of the floppy. i surmised that since i don't have a windows drive hooked up, and moved everything up one in the chain that i could just change the comman to mfsadd -x /dev/hdb /dev/hda but that didn't work either. when i run that command, it says:

# mfsadd -x /dev/hdb /dev/hda
/dev/hdb10: Success
mfs_load_volume_header: mfsvol_read_data: Input/Output Error

What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for the help.

Posted by: regan at Jul 31, 2003 2:21:11 PM

This is slightly off-topic, but I have just upgraded my newly purchased series 2 TiVo box and still have my other (series 1) hooked up. The stupid thing that I didn't consider was that I do have quite a few things saved on my series 1 (which I plan on selling) that I would like to somehow get on my series 2. I have been totally unsuccessful finding info on this. If anyone could kindly help me, I would realy appreciate it.

Posted by: Brad at Jul 31, 2003 7:06:13 PM

regan, it looks like you did things right, maybe you should try posting at the TiVo upgrade area of the boards for help.

Brad, I'm not aware of any easy way to do this. If the two boxes were identical it'd be easy enough to copy the old box to the new one, but with the series 1 and 2 boxes, it's probably not possible.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Jul 31, 2003 8:55:50 PM

SUCCESS! Thanks for all your help. I went from 60 to 154! I'm excited!

For everyone else, if there's no drive in your computer and just the two tivo drives, the command is different. With your orig tivo drive as A and your new one as B, it'll be:

mfsadd -x /dev/hda /dev/hdb

Posted by: regan at Aug 1, 2003 11:58:56 AM

i lied again. my tivo is dead.

Posted by: regan at Aug 1, 2003 5:10:08 PM

I used a Weaknees upgrade kit for my old TiVo PV100 and it was super easy. I got 2 of my friends to do the same. I just bought a TiVo Series 2, so I can't wait to connect to it wirelessly and program it from work!

Posted by: OutOutBlogger at Aug 1, 2003 5:13:39 PM

I have access to a drive copy machine. Is that something I could use to make it easier. Just copy the old drive (series 1 sony svr2000 30hr) to the new one (some 120GB drive) and insert the new drive?

thanks
keith

Posted by: keith klayman at Nov 18, 2003 6:13:56 PM

Yeah, keith, that's how I've done it in the past when replacing my main tivo drive.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Nov 19, 2003 11:04:31 AM

I'm about to upgrade my PVR7000 Series 2 DirecTivo (OS 3.1 fortunately)... I bought the book Hacking the TiVo by William Von Hagen (NOT Hacking TIVO by Keegan!), and can say it is definitely worth a read for the series 2 information (all other books only cover Series 1). I wish it had more DirecTivo info, but there's plenty on line. It comes with a bootable CD to get you started. Check it out:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592001114/

Posted by: Ken Fricklas at Nov 28, 2003 3:51:35 PM

will this worked on my tivo by directv

Posted by: hildred at Jul 23, 2004 4:39:03 PM

I'm from the UK and there's not so much choice out here... I bought a pre-prepared 200GB TiVo hard disk drive upgrade kit from XtendedPlay (http://www.xtendedplay.co.uk). There was no fiddling around with PC's and it only took 20 minutes...

Posted by: Terry at Aug 27, 2005 4:55:14 PM

can burn movies from my direct tv drive to the computer so i can burn them on dvd? If si can you tell me how, or where to find the information.

Thx Terry

Posted by: Terry at Dec 8, 2006 1:08:52 PM

How can i tell which series I have? I know its from DirecTV and is about 2 years old.

I am hoping I can use this with DishNetwork when I move.

Any help is great.

Posted by: david at Jun 19, 2007 10:34:17 AM