Initial pictures of the HR24-100 and H24-700

[jcrandall]

dbstalk has initial pictures of the HR24-100 and H24-700 today.

DirecTV uses several manufactures to keep up with demand, so this is expected. The -100 is made by Technicolor (formerly RCA) and the -700 by Pace.

The H24 appears to be practically the same.

The HR24-100 is very close to the original HR24-500, but I see one major difference. The -500 has a nice exaust fan on the back to cools the hard drive, and only the hard drive. The -100 resorted to a simple fan that blows out the side of the unit, blowing the hard drive heat over part of the power supply unit and is not directly connected to the side of the unit. This may result in less effective cooling, theoretically.

Both receivers have the same software and same connectors on the back. No word on chipsets and stuff, but I would expect them to be the exact same.

Here is the pictures from dbstalk:
http://hr20.dbstalk.com/docs/24 Series Second Look.pdf

 

[jcrandall]

Another subtle difference, the HR24-500 used a Seagate Pipeline HD, the HR24-100 uses a Western Digital Green Power drive AV drive. Both are AV equipment designed. 500GB of course.

 

[Jimbo]

Jason,
So WHO makes the original one I have the HR24-500's.
You mentioned the -100 RCA/Technicolor ( I think that is the newer version of Thompson as I know Thompson took over from RCA awhile back.
You mentioned the -700's are made by Pace, which was all my HR20-700's.
But didn't say anything about the -500 !

 

[gadgtfreek]

500 is Humax.

I woulda rather had the WD drive in my 500. Guess it does not matter now with the EHD

 

[gadgtfreek]

Just did some reading. The Seagate drive is 5900rpm, the WD, which uses Intellipower, is 5400-7200.

 

[Jimbo]

500 is Humax.

I woulda rather had the WD drive in my 500. Guess it does not matter now with the EHD

I would rather have the Seagate , so... there we are, they are both good drives.

Humax, I remember them from earlier years.

 

[Jimbo]

Just did some reading. The Seagate drive is 5900rpm, the WD, which uses Intellipower, is 5400-7200.

So the Seagate drive spins slower ..... ?
Is that a good thing ?

 

[gadgtfreek]

I dont think it's good or bad, just an observation, they are the same otherwise. 3.0gb's/sec and 8mb cache.

I like Seagate too, but my first choice has been WD. They've always worked for me, and have not have a failure yet. Had one Seagate and two Samsung (crap company) drives crap out.

 

[Jimbo]

I dont think it's good or bad, just an observation, they are the same otherwise. 3.0gb's/sec and 8mb cache.

I like Seagate too, but my first choice has been WD. They've always worked for me, and have not have a failure yet. Had one Seagate and two Samsung (crap company) drives crap out.

I'm mostly the opposite of you, started with Seagate and has always worked well for me, so I stuck with them.
The last one I got though had me thinking about trying a different brand because the Seagate was very hard to find locally and I didn't want to buy one online to find out that it wouldn't work and have to send it back.

 

[TigerpounceTN]

So the Seagate drive spins slower ..... ?
Is that a good thing ?

It really doesn't matter for the purpose of a DVR as long as it can keep up with what it is asked to do. There should be no difference that anyone can notice. If you put the faster drive in a PC, random seeking performance would be faster and the system would be a little bit faster, but for a DVR, the speed is fine.

 

[Jimbo]

It really doesn't matter for the purpose of a DVR as long as it can keep up with what it is asked to do. There should be no difference that anyone can notice. If you put the faster drive in a PC, random seeking performance would be faster and the system would be a little bit faster, but for a DVR, the speed is fine.

Yes, I agree, was just wondering, thinking that running slower might not wear it out as quickly, but thats not really an issue with them.

Got to remember with the DVR buffering, it's ALWAYS spinning, 24/7.

 

[DJ Rob]

Let's put 10,000 RPM drives in these things and let them record 4 HD shows at a time!

 

[cditty]

A 5400 rpm WD green can record 4 hd channels at once without any problem. That is nowhere near it's sustained write speed.

 

[sundrop]

The only positive is that Pace is making D* recievers. In the Cable reciever world, pace makes the better tuners than motorola

 

[Jimbo]

The only positive is that Pace is making D* recievers. In the Cable reciever world, pace makes the better tuners than motorola

Pace has been making D& recvrs for awhile now, unfortunately not all of them.
The Old HR20-700's were Pace models. My favorite till the HR24's.
I really wish Pace had made the original HR24.

 

[cfb]

Western Digitals "intellipower" that suggests a varied rotation speed is basically crap. I think they were already approached on a potential lawsuit over it and I thought they'd removed that from their marketing material.

There is no consumer grade technology for varying rotational speed. The drives run at a fixed speed of either 5400 or 5900, I forget which. Some lab rats actually hooked up some equipment to it and ran it through its paces and found the same approximate fixed speed as every other drive in this category.

Rotational speed isnt really that crucial in a DVR disk drive. Lower speeds usually equals lower power consumption and lower heat output. Whats important in performance is how many platters/heads are in use and the density of the data, since that has a major effect on throughput. I have a 7200 rpm drive with three platters and low data density and a single platter 5400rpm drive with high data density. The 'slow' drive kicks the 'fast' drives butt.

Another critical performance factor in DVR drives are the 'AV' features. The two chief features of an AV model drive is that the disk abandons a read error almost immediately rather than retrying for a lengthy period of time, and the cache can be divides into as many as 12 distinct pipes, rather than one single cache.

I own both the Seagate pipeline and the western digital AV drives. Both are extremely quiet, low power drives. My pipeline has been in use for nearly a year, about 4 months on the WD AV drive.

My disk experiences have varied. For many years I had very bad luck with WD and Samsung. Lately it seems the Samsung drives have improved considerably, and the WD drives are pretty good. I stuck with Seagate for years because I never had a drive failure. That seems to have gone downhill lately, as I've seen a lot of seagate fails over the last couple of years along with some major issues that effected entire series of drives and required firmware fixes. Seems a lot sloppier than what they used to put out.

 

[gadgtfreek]

Appears they don't "suggest" anything. Drives with intellipower vary in speed between sizes, but the drive doesnt vary it's speed.

Can Western Digital drives vary their spin speeds?

• Alert
• Print

That would be a no
By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author
Posted in Storage, 21st May 2009 23:50 GMT
Free whitepaper – Taking control of your data demons: Dealing with unstructured content
There has been some confusion about whether Western Digital's IntelliPower technology varies a drive's rotation speed or not. Well, it doesn't.
A WD spokesperson said that IntelliPower does not vary a drive's spin speed while it is in use. The drives have fixed spin speeds and these may vary with individual drive capacity points within a particular drive model.


But the 1 and 2TB AV-GP drives both have a 5400rpm rotation speed.

IntelliPower is the marketing name for a particular choice of spin speed, caching algorithms, and transfer rates that WD uses to indicate a drive has a low power draw combined with good performance characteristics. The inference is that pure rpm numbers alone don't provide an adequate picture of a drive's performance.
However, for technology aficionados, spin speed is an essential element in understanding a hard drive's overall performance characteristics and being able to compare and contrast it to other drives from the same and from different manufacturers

Can Western Digital drives vary their spin speeds? ? The Register

 

[cfb]

Appears they don't "suggest" anything. Drives with intellipower vary in speed between sizes, but the drive doesnt vary it's speed.

Originally WD did in fact suggest a variable rotation speed and for some time refused to state a rotational speed.

This was their way to obfuscate consumer reception for the product, much like some CPU manufacturers dropped MHz ratings for 'performance ratings'. WD originally advertised this as a '7200 rpm "class" drive that uses variable rotational speeds', then after some guys measured the motor frequency during use to find that the rotational speed was fixed.

Further, using a variable rotational speed would cause heavy fluctuations in power demand and heat output, which would be contrary to the power savings objectives.

Here's an example of how the marketing-speak confused a leading expert at the time of release:
Seagate and Western Digital 1TB Drives: Improved and Green - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

Tomshardware ran into the same "variable between 5400 and 7200" claim and republished it as well.

Here someone starts getting to the bottom of it:

Western Digital's Caviar Green hard drive - The Tech Report - Page 1

"When it first launched the GreenPower Caviar, WD refused to disclose the drive's actual spindle speed, saying only that it was somewhere between 5,400 and 7,200RPM. The company later admitted that the drive ran at closer to the former than the latter, but we haven't been able to coax out an exact spindle speed."

I'm a little pressed for time right now, but a later analysis measuring the frequency of the drive motors found that almost all of the WD 'intellipower' drives ran at 5400 rpm, with a single model running at 5900. While the statement that the motors could be set at the factory to run at any speed between 5400 and 7200 rpms is accurate, it was fairly meaningless once the drive left the factory and in the absence of other performance factors related to the drive.

The point remains that these drives run at a fixed rate of rotation which is similar to competitors drives, that originally WD sought to obfuscate the performance characteristics, and that it took over a year of cajoling and 3rd party testing before they backed off of implying a variable rotational speed.

 

[jaj1701]

Just FYI, my install was 4 x HR24-500's with April manufacture dates. I had seen the "2nd look" and am glad that I got the 500's just for the fan location. Not sure it matters, or that the other design isn't better.....I just felt better about this design.

 

[ryotgz]

My install is scheduled for July 11. I requested the HR24 model so we'll see which variant I get.