Ok the original 500gb hard drive died. I had another Seagate low profile hard drive that fit the HR24-200's cage. I was able to use a linux based utility to do a 1:1 copy from the old drive (after a little tap on it to get the drive heads out of park when it booted up in a PC). I ran on the cloned drive for some time, but it was a borrowed hard drive from a PC, so it eventually died. The only thing I had around was an early generation 64GB mSATA SSD drive and SATA adapter from an older laptop. I used this for a little bit of time just so the HR24 could watch live TV. After it formatted 64GB drive, it only really had enough space for its buffer, so it couldn't record.
I ended up coming across a 250GB 2.5" laptop drive from doing computer repair work and someone didn't want it anymore. This is what I have in the HR24 now. It's just sitting in there connected to the sata and power. I don't record much on the HR24, only a few things when the HR44 is out of tuners and already recording 5 things.
Doing computer repair work I have access to good pricing and all components imaginable. Heck my home firewall is on a 128GB SSD running pfSense. That's more for power consumption since its on all the time, rather than performance, but I digress. I don't mind experimenting with something like a 256GB SSD, and if it doesn't work out, sell it, off load it or use it in another project. I'm not looking for vast amounts of storage because the HR44 does 95% of all DVR tasks in the home. I'm really just looking for a set top box that makes watching TV fun again. When it takes just as long to find something to watch via IP service like Netflix, PlutoTV, Youtube, or whatever... it no longer feels like its worth over $100 a month for TV service.
The HR44 is another story. Yes i know about the CE, but its not coming to the HR34 or lower. I'm not interested in running anything risky or disrupting my wifes experience, so I haven't personally tested the CE yet. Since they don't have it for the HR24, I'll never test it until maybe its almost ready and I grab it a few weeks before national release in the 3-4am EST window when they are doing staged NR roll-outs.
I've read that the clients are slow and DirecTV "ready" TV's are even slower (and seemingly harder to come by anyway). But where would you guage the different clients compared to an HR34, HR24, HR23, HR21 for example?
Is a C31/41 faster or slower than an HR24?
Is a C61k faster or slower than an HR24?
Does it matter what genie is running the server? Is a C61k for example faster when a Genie Air or Genie 2 (whatever they are calling that headless server these days) is used? Is it faster if an HR54 is used over an HR44?
Obviously I've heard horror stories about the HR34. I have to wonder if its more on par with what I'm experiencing with the 24. It would be nice if I could have 2 genie's and run the CE on one of them, but that doesn't seem to be an option.
Thankfully its not a heavily used TV, but when it is, its just frustrating.