[ghardenb]

I am experiencing the sluggish performance from my HR22 as are so many others. Navigating the guide, changing channels, accessing menus etc. It seems like it functions better when the playlist is shorter with less recorded material and more available space. Has anyone had the experience of adding an external high-capacity SATA drive (ie. 750gb to 1T) and finding that this improves speed?

If yes, what drive did you use? Size? Happy with it?

If you added a large drive but saw no speed improvement please tell me that as well.

Thanks!

 

[hasan]

I am experiencing the sluggish performance from my HR22 as are so many others. Navigating the guide, changing channels, accessing menus etc. It seems like it functions better when the playlist is shorter with less recorded material and more available space. Has anyone had the experience of adding an external high-capacity SATA drive (ie. 750gb to 1T) and finding that this improves speed?

If yes, what drive did you use? Size? Happy with it?

If you added a large drive but saw no speed improvement please tell me that as well.

Thanks!

I have an HR20-700 with a 2 TB drive on it (external). It is sluggish. I think we have to wait for the 05C8 or 05Cb update for the speed to improve, from what I have been reading. It will automagically be pushed to your box, when the "time" is right. I'm still waiting to get a look at it.

It sounds promising, but the sample size and time to evaluate it are pretty small. Hang in there.

 

[CCarncross]

If you have an HR22 that is several years old, it is possible that the HDD is beginning to shows signs of age as well. If that is the case, its quite possible that installing an external drive could help substantially. My 2 HR22's and my HR20 all seem to perform pretty well, especially compared to some of the gloom and doom stories we read about here, but I have newer external drives on all of them so it may be part of the reason why I don't see the same sluggishness that gets constantly discussed in some of these threads.

 

[kosh56]

I had a 1TB drive on my HR20-100 that failed so I went back to the stock drive. I saw no speed improvement whatsoever.

 

[SFNSXguy]

I have two HR20-700 both have external WD20EURS AV-GP drives (in Antec MK-1 enclosures), both work very well -- with occasional slow operation issues that usually last for only 5-10 minutes. The "sometimes slow" operation is exactly the same as I experience when operating on the internal drives.

 

[Richierich]

I Installed 2 TB WD20EADS on all of my HR24-500s and they Work Fast due to the Faster RPMs and the Larger Cache Buffer Area so I would think the same Result would be if you had these Drives in an External Enclosure.

 

[TomCat]

If you have an HR22 that is several years old, it is possible that the HDD is beginning to shows signs of age as well. If that is the case, its quite possible that installing an external drive could help substantially...

I doubt "substantially". A HDD that is slow is slow because it has difficulty reading the data, and tries over and over again (or it is fragmented, but that is not an issue for DVRs). A HDD in that condition has more issues than just sluggishness if in a DVR; it would have problems with R/W of media as well, which is a much larger problem. One that does not show these problems likely has no R/W problems for paging the UI, either.

And it is doubtful that the sluggishness you are seeing has anything at all to do with the HDD. To be more accurate, it is indeed impacted by the fact that it is doing simultaneous R/W of media virtually all the time and that it is a 5400 RPM drive, but those are issues that will affect a newer drive as well.

The consensus is that DVRs are slow because they are being loaded with crap apps and features we really don't need, a HD GUI retrofit into a SD GUI original design, limited CPU speed and power, and just piss-poor coding in the first place. This causes a lot of VM paging, which will not change with changing the HDD.

There is a very good reason that there are a lot of reports (many on this very thread) that a HDD upgrade will not impact the speed of the DVR, and that very good reason is because that is not where the problem lies.

 

[Richierich]

There is a very good reason that there are a lot of reports (many on this very thread) that a HDD upgrade will not impact the speed of the DVR, and that very good reason is because that is not where the problem lies.

I Totally Disagree as I have 5 HR24-500s which Experience No Sluggishness at all compared to my 2 HR23-700s which are Sluggish like other Report.

The Only Difference in mine and others who have Sluggish HR24-500s is that I Replaced the Hard Drive with a Faster RPM Drive with a Larger Cache which Improves Seek Time and Reduces the Amount of Paging that has to take place which is the longest and most time consuming Operation in a PC which is what a DVR is.

How can you Explain that I am Having No Problems and other Customers with the same HR24-500 and the same Software are Experiencing Sluggishness???

 

[TomCat]

Coincidence. That's how.

There is no empirically-provable connection here. Your position is based on a single anecdotal experience. My position is based on an understanding of the physics of how the technology actually works, along with the research of almost everyone else who posts on this issue on this forum.

Lots of folks have sluggishness; there are a variety of reasons. The HDD being a 5400 with a small cache is probably the least likely of them.

My sluggishness problems affected all 3 DVRs to an annoying level up until last month; now they are all magically fast again. I can't tell you exactly why. But I don't superstitiously attribute it to coincidental factors that likely have no connection.

If I did, I would say that the cure for sluggishness is to wait a month, and everything will improve. That seems to have about as logical a connection as does blaming it on the HDD speed and cache size.

You could also try improperly capitalizing every other word. That might help.

 

[bobcamp1]

In my experience bigger hard drives eventually slow things down. There are more recordings, so the database of recordings gets larger, so the DVR spends more time sifting through it whenever you want to display the list or record a new show.

This is general of DVRs. I have not tried it with the D* DVRs. But if they limit the number of SLs to 50, they have database issues they're trying to mitigate.

 

[jes]

I have an HR20-700 with a 2 TB drive on it (external). It is sluggish. I think we have to wait for the 05C8 or 05Cb update for the speed to improve, from what I have been reading. It will automagically be pushed to your box, when the "time" is right. I'm still waiting to get a look at it.

It sounds promising, but the sample size and time to evaluate it are pretty small. Hang in there.

0x05C8 does not solve the problem for my HR20-100s, it's worse.

The size of the drive should not affect the general performance of the DVR, except when you are talking to it, i.e. displaying a large Playlist. Code design like optimization & data caching, can improve the performance greatly... my pet peeve; Playlist sorting. Why does the Playlist resort every time I enter it, even when no data has been changed? Likely because it's not cached and no dirty bit it set/checked... :nono2:

 

[palmgrower]

After replacing an internal 500 gb with a 2TB 7200 64mb cache, I can attest that normal speed got a bit faster on my HR24-500. A bit.