508 questions...

[gxshiem]

Hi, I got my 508 today and it's working great. I have a question though. Is the 508 always recording when turned on? Does this then significantly reduce the life of the hard drive? Thanks.

[Mark Holtz]

Yes. When you are tuned to live TV, up to 60 minutes of the current channel is buffered on the hard drive. Need to take care of something? Pause. What did he say? Skip back 10 seconds.

You can also "rewind" in the buffer to the show beginning and then have it start recording. The 508 will give you the option of recording to the end of the program, etc.

No, this doesn't affect the life of the hard drive.

[gxshiem]

Thanks. But I'm still not convinced that this can be good for a hard drive becuase the hard drive is never "idle" unless the unit is turned off. Hope I'll never have any problems. Thanks again.

[gcutler]

Thanks. But I'm still not convinced that this can be good for a hard drive becuase the hard drive is never "idle" unless the unit is turned off. Hope I'll never have any problems. Thanks again.

Hard drives today are very hardy, you have servers which are always reading and writing that can go years without problems. Thats not to say that guarantees no failures.

The only thing to consider is moving the unit, because it is always writing, be very careful about moving it, best to turn it off and unplug it, where as a regular PC can be moved a few inches while turned on without much problem if the drive is not doing anything at the time.