Watching Recorded Shows after Canceling Directv?

I just had to send back an HR24-500 and an HR24-200. I have been told by the ATT folks that all HRs are going to be recovered. Whether those people have any real knowledge of that...I have no idea. I read the new ATT ToS and in that they say that all HRs are recoverable. Which makes me happy, I don't want to see the 24s go away.

Rich

 

I wouldn't assume just because they are recovering them all that they will continue refurbishing them. Perhaps they have finally figured out that the confusion over which ones to return and which ones to not return isn't worth it, and just have everyone return anything regardless of its age or condition. Then they can send the ones they don't want to refurbish to be recycled, instead of relying on customers which means many of them end up in landfills.

 

The 24-500 I just got didn't seem to have much done to it. I expected the refurb to run well for at least a few months but it was slow when I got it. I put an SSD on it and it's running like the others now. They did not replace the HDD in that HR. I'm beginning to think all they do is wipe the old HDDs and send them out. If that's true someone is gonna be surprised by how much capacity the HRs I just sent back with 2TB drives in them have.

Good points in your post...but you are assuming they have a plan when all I see is chaos at ATT.

Rich

 

I'd guess they just do a "reset everything", and wipe down the case. If they have anything wrong with them other than maybe a bad hard drive, or even if they smell from being in a smoker's home, I'll bet they send even a nearly new Genie to be recycled. Not going to be worth the time of someone to try to diagnose and repair when they cost so little to make.

Companies as large as AT&T will simultaneously have well planned stuff and stuff that's complete chaos. If they have someone in charge of their environmental/recycling efforts that's on the ball they'd make the change to recover everything and recycle most of it because that's something they can brag about - if they have some stats that say (for example) 50% of receivers we don't want back end up in landfills, and that's 1 million receivers a year weighing 5 lbs each they can say "AT&T's new policies will recycle 2.5 million pounds of electronic waste that would have ended up in landfills"

 

Yeah, they seem to just wiping the HDDs clean. If they were putting in new HDDs they would not be as slow as the last refurb I got. I've tried wiping the HDDs clean and sometimes it works well but that doesn't last long. Only really positive thing they could do is stick a new HDD in the refurbs. But that would cost more money...not that HDDs are expensive now but I doubt they'd do that. Money grubbers rarely do the right thing.

Rich

 

There isn't any difference between an empty hard drive and a new hard drive performance wise. I don't know why you see the difference you to, must be that whatever you are doing to wipe them isn't really doing that. Using "format" on a PC definitely would NOT.

 

Speculation / Question : Does wiping the drive / format fix bad sectors on the drive ?
I would think if a drive was formatted with bad sectors on it before formatting they would still be there and possibly cause small problems that would probably start getting worse as soon as you started using it.

 

When you choose to run a Full format on a volume, files are removed from the volume that you are formatting and the hard disk is scanned for bad sectors. ... If you choose the Quick format option, the format removes files from the partition, but does not scan the disk for bad sectors.

 

The drive automatically maps out bad sectors and replaces them from a pool of spares. However, bad sectors are quite rare in modern hard drives - there's no way that could account for what Rich is seeing because no one could be so unlucky as to get bad sectors in all their drives! Unless he's the kind of guy who throws a shoe at the DVR when his team loses

What I think is happening is that Directv is using a Linux filesystem, and if you put that on a Windows PC do the default "quick" format it isn't going to erase the backup superblocks so the Linux filesystem is somewhat intact. The root directory will be gone so Linux would have to recreate it, but it will still be fragmented. To make sure it is really wiped you'd want to use some sort of "disk wiper" tool on a PC that writes to the whole drive, or in Linux do 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX'. That would eliminate all traces of what was there before, so when you put it in a DVR it will look and act like a brand new / empty drive.

 

When i axed my HR24-500 in August they didn’t want it back

 

I had a very long discussion on this topic with a guy that is in the industry.
He said that like all magnetic media hard drives are susceptible to magnetic degradation. The drive will read or write to a sector and then verify that the data is correct using checksums, the more times it has to repeat the read or write cycle is the slower the drive gets. If it fails the cycle on a sector for a certain amount of times it is marked as a bad sector. New drives will of course R/W each sector on the first try so they are faster than a drive of the same model that has been working hard and has to do multiple passes on the same sector. Fragmentation is of course another issue but a proper reformat would fix that issue in an HR.

As a drive ages plus the added mechanical wear it will lead to a slowing down of the drive. Also drives stored away in drawers for years may lose their data because the magnetic markers on the platter are refreshed in the drive under normal use.

YMMV but 5 years is often the point when a drive will start to slow down and then eventually die.

 

I don't think I've ever said I reformatted the HDDs in a computer. The only time I've formatted an HDD for a DVR is the initial format that always occurs when a new drive is added. What I meant by wiped was I took all the content off the HDDs and that usually produced an uptick in performance.

I've never spent any time trying to get an old HDD working well, I wanted my DVRs working. Easiest way to do that is stick a brand new HDD in or on an HR. Best way is to stick an SSD on them.

Rich

 

I have no hard evidence about how long it takes an HDD to start producing problems on an HR but I think those problems start much sooner than after 5 years of operation. But that depends on how the HDDs are treated. So, YMMV fits. Was the person you spoke to familiar with DVRs and how HDDs work in them?

Rich

 

Wasn't the change about refunds not going into effect until January 19?