[madcratebuilder]

My current hr21 is about 18 months old. I did experience some slow down with the GUI upgrade last fall? but have lived with it, not that bad. About five weeks ago the system really slowed down. I experienced audio lockup, video lockup, total system freeze, no response to the remote, I've had dozens and dozens of reboots, one scan disk with sector repair.

Three days ago it has rebooting about every thirty minutes. This was with both the internal HD and a WD 3TB external HD. I would use the external for recording I wanted to keep for a period of time.

Yesterday I hooked the external HD to my lap top and did a complete reformat, then installed back on the hr21. On start up it did the expected download and this is now running faster than I have ever seen. Thirty hours now and it's running as fast as it did with the old GUI.

I had the opinion that the problems were firmware related but now I think it was all about the HD, at least in my case.

With all the reports of problems could many of these be related to a failing HD?

I have a WD 5400rpm 3TB HD in a in a Thermaltake Max5 enclosure with eSATA cabling to the HR21. It would cost about $200 to duplicate this setup. It sure seems to have fixed my problems.

 

[scottchez]

Even if you are NOT using an external Hard Drive and you choose to reset all which wipes the whole hard drive and ALL settings, the HD DVR becomes super super fast until you fill it up with 75% or more.

I have confirmed this several times with Two HR20s and One HR21

They seem to have a partition issue even since they started pre downloading PPV for instant on demand.
I am sure they will fix this soon.