Average shelf life

Yes the WD series EADS work well, I have one in a HR20-700 (new10/06) when the original failed last year. My other HR20-700 (new09/07) is still doing fine.

 

"Green" HDD's can be used anywhere a regular one would be. They are primarily designed to use less power than traditional drives. I would be interested to see if there is any performance difference using one, but would assume there would be no noticeable difference. My external 'green' drive seems to perform just as well as any other one I've used in the past.

 

Thanks :allthumbs

I thought I had read previously a lot of their energy savings came from the times when not used which does not happen in the DVR world

 

Lower power consumption also lowered the internal temp by 4 degrees in my HR20-700.

 

Ditto...December '06 and still going strong. Knocking on wood!

 

The HDD in my HR20-700 died over 2 years ago, I slapped an external on it and its been running fine ever since. Personally I don't trust drives that run 24/7 over about 3.5 years..I usually replace them before they fail, allowing me to move the data to a new drive and not lose anything.

 

They didn't come out till the late summer of '06.

Rich

 

Yup, the EADS and EVDS work well. Not sure if the EADS is green. The new EURS seems to be the new green HDD of choice.

Rich

 

I have a bunch of them and I see no difference in performance.

Rich

 

I've seen that in my 20-700s too, but my EADS lowered the temps to 118 degrees. The normal range for a 20-700 is 123-126 degrees. Oddly my EVDS drives do not lower the temps. But they run well.

Rich

 

I've got eight 20-700s, some of them made in Mexico (the oldest ones) and all have either new internal HDDs or new external HDDs. All run well.

Rich

 

I suspect that the life of a DVR is more dependent on how much heat it has had to endure over its lifetime as opposed to the spin or seek time.

Most of the models that had inferior cooling have probably fallen out (or been removed) from circulation.

 

My HR20-700 has been working since I got it in October of 2006. OTOH, I had an HR20-100 which failed about three years ago.

 

Thats great advice. Ive had HR20's and HR22's last several years, and recently had a 24 die in only a few months.

 

I had my HR20-700 since 11/06 still working flawless

 

My first HR20-700 lasted a little over a month. It was replaced with another HR20-700 which lasted a little over eight months. That got replaced with a HR22-100 which has been going strong for over fourteen months.

 

Hey, I'm glad for all of you. And it's good to hear that these things are still out there doing great. But these drives are often in hot, dust-filled environments and a lot of them do die. It's just something to think about when you are using a DVR for more than three years, if you are saving a lot of stuff on it.

 

I guess I didnt recall correctly. Must be March 2007. I remembered watching March Madness after having it installed.

I am hoping the new Tivo will be out if it ever dies --if not the new HR24 sounds pretty good too.

 

Of course we aren't really talking about the life of the HR20-700 itself, but rather the hard drive. I wonder how much life is extended by using an eSATA drive? Mine has had eSATA on it for several years. While the internal drive is spinning, it isn't dong any read/write cycles. If one wanted to keep an HR20-700 for a long time, using eSATA drives and discarding them when they croak would be a way to keep the DVR and just change external drives.

 

I have three HR20-700's that have been running perfect since late 2006. All are using the original hard drives. For most of the time, I have had laptop cool pads sitting on all three.