Hard Drives Made Specially for DVRs

When searching for a new or additional hard drive for your TiVo (or other digital video recorder), it is critical to understand that the quality and type of drive used matters tremendously. DVR manufacturers such as TiVo, DIRECTV, ReplayTV and others spend countless hours and resources "qualifying" hard drives to ensure that they choose drives that will provide optimal performance.

Almost since its inception, WeaKnees has been using high-end drives made specifically for DVRs. We are currently using Western Digital Audio/Video drives, and in some cases, Seagate's DB35, AV and Pipeline drive lines. All weaKnees drives were developed specifically for use in DVRs.

The DVR drives that we use in upgrade kits have a few key differences from normal desktop drives that make them far superior to desktop drives for PVR usage:

• Thermal Control: On board sensors monitor temperature and adjust characteristics as necessary to keep the temperature optimal.
• Acoustic Management: DVR-specific drives are specially tuned to run as quietly as possible.
• A/V Streaming: DVR-specific drives have been optimized and tuned to provide consistent data to the PVR processor. Standard desktop drives can hang while retrying drive reads - DVR drives know to move ahead and provide more data to keep video smooth.
• Error Recovery: Desktop drives retry on errors to make sure that your Excel spreadsheet is exactly right - it's imperative. But when watching video, if one block of data is bad, you may not even notice a dark spot on one frame for 1/30th of a second. So these drives are tuned to move past errors faster, putting the stream of data as top priority. Where desktop drives often cause stutters, these drives run smooth.