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Humax's 300hr TiVo and big disks for all

Yesterday, Humax announced new 80Gb and 250Gb TiVo, the top one offering up to 300hrs of storage at the lowest quality. You can buy upgrade kits to do pretty much the same and I suspect the ~$600 unit will likely cut into sales by TiVo upgrade kit folks.

The good news from all this is that the Series 2 operating system in these Humax units is definitely supporting large disks. The linux kernel used by TiVo could only see a maximum of 137Gb in any single hard drive. If you stuffed a 160Gb, 250Gb, or larger drive into a TiVo, you'd only see 137Gb of it.

Until recently, the only way to get large drive support in a TiVo was to hack in a LBA48 sensing kernel, like this hack mentioned previously on PVRblog. When the HDTV TiVos were announced and released, they too came with 250Gb drives and the TiVo hacker community knew it was only a matter of time before new TiVo OS upgrades would allow for large disks.

Humax is planning to release their TiVos later this month that feature a single 250Gb, and word on the street is that both these new units and the Pioneer DVD burning TiVos (as well as all new TiVos, eventually) are running a new 5.x version of the TiVo operating system, complete with a linux kernel update and large disk support, which is good news for everyone. No longer will upgrades require more than one disk to get more than 160 hours of storage.

by Matt Haughey July 14, 2004 in News

Comments

The Pioneer units run 5.2x and definitely have LBA48 support. One of the forthcoming Toshiba DVD-RW units has a 160GB drive, so that must also have LBA48 support. The existing Toshiba DVD player has 5.1x, IIRC, but I don't think anyone ever sorted out upgrading the drive in that one.

The nice thing about this is you could theoretically buy the 80GB unit and then stick in a couple of 300GB drives...

Posted by: MegaZone at Jul 15, 2004 11:38:34 AM

I wonder if these TiVo software updates will be rolled out to older Series2 units. It would be nice if we could upgrade to having LBA48 support without hacking the kernel ourselves.

Posted by: Ryan at Jul 16, 2004 10:45:07 AM

We seriously doubt the introduction of even larger TiVo units will "cut into sales" of our upgrade products. Historically, the availability of larger and larger TiVo units has not impacted our ability to sell upgrade kits and services - the price/hour of such units has always been significantly higher than after-market offerings, and most customers seeking our services already have a TiVo they wish to expand; they are not getting rid of an existing, and smaller TiVo so that they can purchase a larger one...

Posted by: Lou Jacob at Jul 17, 2004 5:54:53 AM

$600 for the 250 GB Humax Tivo.
$49 for a refurb 40 hour Tivo brand Tivo, plus $150 for a 250 Gig drive. Plus the time it takes (couple of hours).

So it's around $200 for the same thing. DIY installs will remain much cheaper.

Posted by: Jeff at Jul 19, 2004 9:43:24 AM

I am new to the TIVO world and need advise on how to get started - what to buy, what set up I need at home - where do I need to worry about compatability issues - who do i contact ? Can someone help?

Posted by: Cheryl at Jul 23, 2004 9:33:25 AM

Yep, $49 for refurb, plus $92 for 120Gb = 160Gb machine for $141 - took about 20 minutes to add second drive - and Home Media options now included - great deal! Didn't feel I needed 250Gb - but clearly it's going to be much cheaper to DIY than buy the $600 consumer unit if I need to go further.

Posted by: Nigel at Aug 19, 2004 7:27:39 AM

Hey all, new TiVo owner and I love it (except the forced phone line for initial setup). I'm already so addicted, I want to throw in a new drive. I'm pretty computer savvy so the part I'm most worried about is finding a FAT32 disk since my only PC runs Linux. That being said, what is the maximum disk size the new TiVos can see? I just bought mine, it's a 540x 40-hour standalone model running 5.3 (I think it's .3). I'm looking to replace the single drive, not add on. I'm not looking to put in a 300 GB drive, but maybe a 200. Feasible?

Also, I saw earlier upgrade guides suggesting I use 5400 RPM drives because the cooling wasn't set up to really handle a 7200 RPM drive. Is this still the case with the newer models? Thanks in advance,

-p-

Posted by: Patrick at Sep 13, 2004 9:45:33 PM

I now have tivoweb and dvr archive running but I found out I can not convert ty files using ty tools. Because some of my files are legacy. I found this posting
http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=31213

and wanted to know if you know anyone who could telnet into my Tivo and do this upgrade?

Posted by: steve at Oct 16, 2004 3:54:20 PM

You don't have to use a phone line for initial setup. Just put in ,#401 as a dialing prefix and it will use a network connection for the initial setup.

Posted by: Tivo user at Dec 31, 2004 6:45:04 PM

great joy looking through all this interesting stuff..

Posted by: Luis Percy at Mar 23, 2005 3:07:54 AM