Diskology tool for TiVo upgrades

An interesting bit of news from Diskology is that their new disk copying hardware/software package Disk Jockey will include utilities to prepare hard drives for TiVo boxes, and will even work on the mac.

At $349, the Disk Jockey is a pretty hefty price to pay for a backup system, but it's cool to see a hardware manufacturer recognize the benefits of providing means to backup specialized operating systems like TiVo.

Comments

[Lou]

Not sure I understand the value of this product. It sounds slow, and they are somewhat cryptic about how/what it does. They did approach us awhile back but from what I recall it is a very slow way to upgrade; not sure that sending someone into the field to perform an upgrade in this fashion is cost-effecient; not sure where the market is for something like this.

Lou Jacob
PTVupgrade

[david]

it is very valuable

[Frank Buchwalder]

Lou, I'm not sure what you mean by "sounds slow." Read the review of Disk Jockey on PCmech.com and you'll find the statement that
"Very fast data throughput" is one of the product's virtues.

[Tony Overbay]

Hi Lou,

That was me that approached you actually. I hope all is well. Here's where we are coming from. The Disk Jockey itself is a fairly handy tool, you can copy drives, erase, test, mirror, etc., but we have had a number of people tell us that they are using the DJ for the purpose of the sector-by-sector disk copy when upgrading a PVR. They still have to put the disk back into a PC to expand but they've saved time with our 2 GB/min data transfer for the copy. We did an 80 GB drive here (upgrading from a 40 GB
PVR) and the copy took about 33 minutes. So with the expansion the entire upgrade took about 40 minutes.

What we are writing is the utility to perform the expansion as well as blessing of drives with the drives hooked up to the Disk Jockey externally. So you take the drive out of the PVR hook it up to port 1 on the DJ. Hook the new drive to port 2, press one button and copy. Then hook the DJ up to your laptop via firewire or USB, run our utility and expand or bless, then put the new, larger drive back into the PVR.

Where the real value lies is with portability. A tech can offer this as a service, an in-home service and make money on the service call, the hard drive and have a new computer client to boot.

We aren't expecting this to be our "bread and butter," 99% of our sales went into the IT market in 2004, but we thought it was a great verticle market to explore since we (at Diskology) all own PVRs anyway. As we beta test the software we're already looking at what else we can do with the software portion of the equation.

Thanks!

Tony Overbay, CEO
Diskology, Inc.