The Good and Bad of a Souped-Up TiVo
March 1 -- One of Amazon's most popular technology books last month was Hacking TiVo.
The book's enormous popularity intrigues me because of what it says about TiVo digital video recorders: 1) Geeks love TiVo; and 2) Many of these same gadget-happy TiVo owners are not satisfied with TiVo in its off-the-shelf incarnation.
I've spent many envious minutes listening to people talk about TiVo-ing their favorite shows, and I've wanted to get in on the action for quite some time. I'm also aware that many people think TiVo needs upgrading — myself included.
With that in mind, I turned to WeaKnees.com, a TiVo upgrade and parts company. WeaKnees.com takes TiVo Series 2 systems, and throws in another hard drive, bumping up the storage capacity from 80 hours (at lowest visual quality) to as many as 320 hours.
Heavy-Duty Guts
The unit WeaKnees.com loaned me actually has two 120GB drives (the company offers a number of configuration options). WeaKnees.com also adds an extra fan or two, depending on the model, as well as a fan bracket. The combo is known as the TwinBreeze and Advanced Cooling Pak. It's designed to keep WeaKnees.com's "TiVo on steroids" cooler than standard models. According to WeaKnees.com, the fans are quieter than those in a standard TiVo.
There's also a PowerTrip Supply Saver, which delays the spin-up time of both drives so that the factory-installed 38-watt TiVo power supply can still support the drives — a pretty neat trick.
The WeaKnees.com upgrade machine costs about $558 — a worthwhile proposition and one that is certainly preferable to trying to upgrade TiVo myself. After all, opening the TiVo case voids the company warranty. WeaKnees.com takes over the TiVo warranty and extends it by another three months.
A Positive Spin?
WeaKnees.com outfitted my unit with Samsung Spinpoint hard drives, but future systems will have Maxtor QuickView hard drives — the same drives used in a number of competing PVR/DVRs, such as Hughes and Philips. Interestingly, when the WeaKnees.com folks initially described the expanded unit they were sending me, they characterized the Spinpoint drives as "…more reliable than the factory TiVo drives. In addition, the Spinpoints are exceptionally quiet."
In announcing the deal with Maxtor, the company characterized the same drives this way "… and previously we have used standard desktop drives in our upgrades, which are acceptable, but not ideal. Maxtor has now agreed to make these drives available to us, which we expect to improve the reliability and performance of our products."
