Replacing hard disk in 721

[Faw]

You know, if your CPU handle decoding 2 HD streams from satellite, MPEG-2 decomp and encoding/writing 2 HD TS streams to disk, you'll start thinking as E* engineers and will try to reduce CPU load for support journaling file system.

No encoding is done in the receivers and decoding is much simpler and less resource intensive than encoding (don't the receivers use hardware decoders). There were some benchmarks made with a few filesystems here, to save you all the reading they said:

The conclusion is obvious by the "Total Time For All Benchmarks Test." The best journaling file system to choose based upon these results would be: JFS, ReiserFS or XFS depending on your needs and what types of files you are dealing with. I was quite surprised how slow ext3 was overall, as many distributions use this file system as their default file system. Overall, one should choose the best file system based upon the properties of the files they are dealing with for the best performance possible!

There is some info on journaling file systems here.

 

[Smith P.]

Thank you for the reference, it's always good to refresh own knowledge in the area.
Wrote 'encoding' I meant encrypting the video/audio recordings on disk.

 

[David_Levin]

Faw: Thanks

 

[bf3000]

Hard Drive Available

Hey everybody,

I just bought a brand new Western Digital 160 GB hard drive (WD1600JBRTL) and followed FAW's procedure and successfully installed it in my 721. Unfortunately, it turns out that the problem I was having with my 721 was not hard drive related, and I therefore do not need this new drive. If anyone is interested, I'll sell the drive for what I paid (105) with the 721 software already loaded up and ready to go. All you will have to do is plug it in and you'll be ready to go. E-mail me if you are interested.

 

[Grandude]

Yup, I checked the 160gb disk and it creates the recording partition with a max size of 124gb, it wont use the remaining of the disk. Also I was able to mount the 1st partition of the disk in Linux and it is not the linux os. The partition is where the downloaded software is placed before installation.

Did you give any thought to using a larger drive: After going though all the steps you noted earlier, removing the drive and using ghost or partition magic to expand the last (recording) partition? Then put it back in the 721.
I'm thinking that the firmware will only create a certain size partition but maybe a larger partition could be used after the initial creation of all the partitions.

 

[markusian]

Did you give any thought to using a larger drive: After going though all the steps you noted earlier, removing the drive and using ghost or partition magic to expand the last (recording) partition? Then put it back in the 721.
I'm thinking that the firmware will only create a certain size partition but maybe a larger partition could be used after the initial creation of all the partitions.

I agree, it is worth trying. Although the firmware always creates a fixed size partition, there is a possibility that it doesn't check the size if it has been already created. It might just use it if it finds it there.

-Mark

 

[Smith P.]

I recall it was failed, 721 have same type of hardcoded limit as recently re-discovered for 921.

 

[Moxiehosting]

721 image

I have a backup image from L054 but for some reason it wants the first partion to be 251mb and when i do what faw asked it only makes it 250 thus in ghost it wont let me drop in from the image any idea's?

 

[sugarrat]

the original HDD is a ATA133. Has anyone tried to use an ATA100 drive? Does an ATA 100 effect performance.


thanks

 

[gibcat]

Hey, I had a 721 die on me and I'm wondering...

if I copy over the data partition only onto a fresh 721, will I still have my recorded PVR events? Has anyone ever tried this?

 

[SimpleSimon]

You're best bet is to Norton Ghost the whole drive. Should work.