[shadowbozo]

Has anyone else had this issue with extremely noisy hard drives in the THR-22? We have two of these units. One is right near the head of one of our beds. The grinding of the drive keeps my wife awake at night. We have replaced the loudest unit twice. The last replacement Tivo unit is quieter but still noticeable.

Are there other folks who have the THR-22 experiencing the same thing?

 

[litzdog911]

How long since installation? There's lots of background tasks during the first few days after installation and setup that causes more hard drive thrash than normal.

 

[macq]

Are you sure it's the hard drive head chatter you are hearing?

The fan in those units is very loud - a more constant hum that varies a little with the underlying hard drive noise.

I had a THR22 from Weaknees that was upgraded to a 1.5TB drive. The head chatter was ridiculously loud. They replaced the drive and the drive is now quiet but the fan hum is quite loud if you are near the unit.

I have 5 different kinds of DVRs in my house right now (experimenting) and the THR22 is by far the loudest of them all. The four others I have are a HR24, old SD D* Tivo, Tivo HD XL, and Tivo Premiere XL.

 

[fasTLane]

Are you sure it's the hard drive head chatter you are hearing?
The fan in those units is very loud - a more constant hum that varies a little with the underlying hard drive noise.
I had a THR22 from Weaknees that was upgraded to a 1.5TB drive. The head chatter was ridiculously loud. They replaced the drive and the drive is now quiet but the fan hum is quite loud if you are near the unit.
I have 5 different kinds of DVRs in my house right now (experimenting) and the THR22 is by far the loudest of them all. The four others I have are a HR24, old SD D* Tivo, Tivo HD XL, and Tivo Premiere XL.

I have a lot of worries about the noise problem. I have about given up on Direct doing right by TiVo.
I have a HR10-250 and it is very quiet. What I am thinking of doing is getting either a TiVo HD XL or TiVo Premiere XL.
How would you rate these 2 DVR's in a side by side comparison?
I also read that there is an element of advertising annoyance on the newer TiVo's. Would you have any recommendations or comments?

 

[macq]

fasTLane, between the HD XL and Premiere XL the Premiere is my favorite. In fact, this Premiere is my favorite of all I've evaluated and is what I am starting to migrate my household to.

The advantages over the HD XL are:

HD Menus - it's more than cosmetic, there are some improvements in simplicity, speed, and extra info.

Picture in Guide - this is live TV in upper right while looking at guide. It always appears - is not configurable. There is also a Picture in Menu which can be turned on/off by configuration or temporarily by button press.

Hulu Plus support - I don't plan to sign up right away but nice to know it's there.

Multi Room Streaming (MRS). Note "Streaming". The HD XL can do Multi Room Viewing (MRV) but content can be marked as non-transferable by the copyright owner. Many movies are marked that way so can't be viewed across rooms/tivos. But, the Premiere's MRS does allow viewing of ANY recording between other Premieres in your household. The Premiere can still do MRV with older Tivos that support it. MRS has other advantages over MRV - such as being able to delete shows on other Premieres or start watching at any point in the recording.

There are other advantages to the Premiere over the HD XL - they just aren't important to me.

I don't know what you mean by advertising annoyance on Tivos. I"m not particularly bothered by anything I encounter for HD XL or Premiere. What is a little annoying is the THR22 has "commercial" info in the guide occasionally which limits how much channel info you can see on one screen. That's annoying.

As for the Premiere vs the THR22, the Premiere is a far better DVR for many reasons - many.

 

[fasTLane]

fasTLane, between the HD XL and Premiere XL the Premiere is my favorite. In fact, this Premiere is my favorite of all I've evaluated and is what I am starting to migrate my household to.
The advantages over the HD XL are:
HD Menus - it's more than cosmetic, there are some improvements in simplicity, speed, and extra info.
Picture in Guide - this is live TV in upper right while looking at guide. It always appears - is not configurable. There is also a Picture in Menu which can be turned on/off by configuration or temporarily by button press.
Hulu Plus support - I don't plan to sign up right away but nice to know it's there.
Multi Room Streaming (MRS). Note "Streaming". The HD XL can do Multi Room Viewing (MRV) but content can be marked as non-transferable by the copyright owner. Many movies are marked that way so can't be viewed across rooms/tivos. But, the Premiere's MRS does allow viewing of ANY recording between other Premieres in your household. The Premiere can still do MRV with older Tivos that support it. MRS has other advantages over MRV - such as being able to delete shows on other Premieres or start watching at any point in the recording.
There are other advantages to the Premiere over the HD XL - they just aren't important to me.
I don't know what you mean by advertising annoyance on Tivos. I"m not particularly bothered by anything I encounter for HD XL or Premiere. What is a little annoying is the THR22 has "commercial" info in the guide occasionally which limits how much channel info you can see on one screen. That's annoying.
As for the Premiere vs the THR22, the Premiere is a far better DVR for many reasons - many.

macq, thank you for your comments! I am debating whether it will be worth the extra cost to go with Premiere to replace my HR10-250. I am hoping to get a lifetime unit.

 

[shadowbozo]

How long since installation? There's lots of background tasks during the first few days after installation and setup that causes more hard drive thrash than normal.

My wife had the Tivo based units for 2+ weeks and decided after multiple replacement units and calls to DTV to just the the quiet HR24 that I have downstairs. I guess a quiet unit was more important than the Tivo interface.

She hasn't complained yet about the HD interface on the HR24. I hope this works for her.

DTV customer support had a supervisor insist my wife was lying about the noise. This person insisted on a DTV tech coming to the house to prove my wife was hearing things. The tech did hear the noise on all 4 of the Tivo based units we had at our house. He ended up installing two more HR24's and took all 4 Tivo based units with him.

Direct TV customer support needs some lessons in "Customer Service". I can't believe the woman said that to my wife and closed the support case even though it wasn't resolved. It's been two days and my wife hasn't complained about the replacement DVRs so I should be happy.

 

[jcmoor9]

I was able to fix this problem on my new THR-22. The drive is now considerably quieter. I can still hear some hard drive seeking, but it is much less noticeable. The problem is that the hard drive is attached in a hard plastic case and screwed directly to the motherboard in two places, and the metal case frame in two places, with no insulating material of any kind. In contrast, my Series 2 Tivos, which are much quieter, have nice rubber anti-vibration bumpers to isolate the drive. All I did was to place some #5 O-rings that I bought in the plumbing department of Lowes between the plastic case and each mount point. Actually I was only able to fit the O-ring under one of the frame mount points, because there is a pretty tight fit and I did not want to push hard on the case. These rings are only 1/16th inch thick; don't bother trying anything thicker. So now the drive case is attached at 3 points, and there is a small gap at the other mount point so that there is no direct contact of case to frame. This is pretty easy to do as long as you have the T-7 star torx screwdriver to get in the case.