Get your replacement HD while you still can

Thinking my Maxtor 160GB QuickView hard drive was going bad, I did some
searching for a possible replacement. According to the ReplayTV DIY Guide,
Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) is the ONLY 5400 rpm drive compatible with
ReplayTV. There are other HDDs available that will work, but they are 7200
RPM and run much hotter. Though HDDs are much cheaper now, a majority are
SATA, not PATA (IDE).

In my search I found 200GB and 320 GB for $40 and $50 respectively, from one
seller. The others wanted almost twice as much for the same drive. These
drives are Maxtor MaXLine II, with the same specs as QuickView series, 5400
RPM with 2Mb cache.

In my experience with Replays, drives will eventually fail. If you plan on
keeping you Replay alive, it might be a good idea to be prepared, in the
event the drive fails.

Any question? Feel free to ask.

Cheers!!!

JW

Joseph Wind wrote:
> Thinking my Maxtor 160GB QuickView hard drive was going bad, I did some
> searching for a possible replacement. According to the ReplayTV DIY Guide,
> Maxtor (now owned by Seagate) is the ONLY 5400 rpm drive compatible with
> ReplayTV. There are other HDDs available that will work, but they are 7200
> RPM and run much hotter. Though HDDs are much cheaper now, a majority are
> SATA, not PATA (IDE).
>
> In my search I found 200GB and 320 GB for $40 and $50 respectively, from one
> seller. The others wanted almost twice as much for the same drive. These
> drives are Maxtor MaXLine II, with the same specs as QuickView series, 5400
> RPM with 2Mb cache.
>
> In my experience with Replays, drives will eventually fail. If you plan on
> keeping you Replay alive, it might be a good idea to be prepared, in the
> event the drive fails.
>
> Any question? Feel free to ask.
>
> Cheers!!!
>
> JW
>
>
The "7200 rpm drives run hotter" is nonsense and Maxtor are not the only
5K compatible drives. Rotational speed and heat are not linked. Ancient
drives ran much hotter than modern fluid drive bearing models. There is
no shortage of IDE drives. The common mistake most people make is buying
the retail pack HD at a mass marketer. The majority of 16meg cache
drives do not work in 5Ks and 7200 rpm and large caches offer no
improvement in performance. The AVSforum has a list of known compatible
and non-compatible drives.

The original drives will fail in a couple of years, but I have never had
a replacement I've installed ever fail. The original drives were
consumer junk at a time when drive mfg were price cutting each other
into bankruptcy. A good drive will last for years.