Hard drive for a PVR?

[chrestomanci]

I am looking for some buying advice.

The Hard drive in my Humax PVR finally died after about 3 years non stop service, so I need to buy another one to get the box working again.

Considering that the PVR runs almost continuously, and I have pause live TV enabled the hard drive will be seeing near constant streaming reads and writes, 24x7.

Considering the high workload, what sort of hard drive would be suitable? I was thinking of buying a WD Red drive, mainly because I have used them in the past without any bad experiences, and because I think that a drive designed to run in a raid array ought to be suitable for 24x7 operation, but is that a wise choice, or is it overkill? or should I choose something with a higher spec such as a WD Purple, or an SSHD?

One thing I cannot justify is an SSD. The drive will be the maximum capacity that the box supports, and I can't afford a 2Tb SSD!

[DanceswithUnix]

2.5 or 3.5 inch, and what capacity are you after? If it is only 1TB or less, I would be tempted to try a laptop drive simply as they are so quiet.

Running continuously usually isn't such a problem. My TiVo series 1 has been recording stuff non stop since the year 2000, and hard drive failures have been surprisingly rare. It is currently running a PATA 120GB drive from the days when that was considered big!

Might be best though to google the model number and drive replacement. Sometimes there are drives these things don't like.

[chrestomanci]

2.5 or 3.5 inch, and what capacity are you after? If it is only 1TB or less, I would be tempted to try a laptop drive simply as they are so quiet.

Running continuously usually isn't such a problem. My TiVo series 1 has been recording stuff non stop since the year 2000, and hard drive failures have been surprisingly rare. It is currently running a PATA 120GB drive from the days when that was considered big!

Might be best though to google the model number and drive replacement. Sometimes there are drives these things don't like.

Thanks

Good advice to Google for the model and hard drive replacement. I will do that.

I will be buying a 2tb one, as I think it would be false economy to get anything smaller.

Is there much chance of recovering my recordings from the old drive? It spins up, but it sounds like it is constantly trying to seek.

[shaithis]

WD Reds are my number one choice of HDD. I have found them to be super-reliable (over 200 installs I have had 1 die and that died within the first hour).

As for recovering, you have 2 choices really....
1. Send to data recovery - Buying the source material (TV shows, Movies) will be cheaper and more reliable!

2. Hope that it was the controller board that went and get a working version of the same drive and swap the controller boards.

[peterb]

Plugging your old drive into a computer might help, you can get clicking if there isn't enough power for the heads to load, so an old drive where the bearings might be drying out might benefit from a bit mor oomph. Long shot, but worth trying. You may need to do it on a linux box though, just in case it is using a linux filesystem like ext3.