Re: Media Center Vs Tivo On Engadget
I’ve owned several dozen Tivos over the past 10 years and I think I only had one hard drive failure in all that time. I’ve also never had a power supply failure or card reader issue.
The series 1 DirecTivos did suffer from power supply failures, but it was still only on a small percentage of units. The same models had some hard drive failures, but the heat buildup inside these units was higher than usual which probably hastened the failure rates.
That being said, you can’t really blame Tivo for hard drive failures as they can just as easily occur in a PC as a Tivo (i.e., Tivo didn’t manufacture the hard drives). Power supply failures on later models could usually be isolated to a bad electrolytic capacitor on later models (easily diagnosed by a visual inspection). A pencil eraser could usually cure card reader problems by cleaning the contacts on the card.
Overalll, I found the Tivo hardware to be extremely reliable. It was the only DVR platform that could be hacked as well as upgraded with larger hard drives (and it still holds that advantage over any other commercially available DVR). ReplayTVs and Ultimate TVs could be upgraded with larger hard drives as could the Dish 501 PVR, although the Dish required a JTAG and some serious hacking skills and was extremely limited in the specific drives that could be used for the upgrade.
ReplayTVs could be upgraded with just about any IDE drive. The Ultimate TVs also had some drive limitations, but nowhere near as stringent as the Dish 501. The Tivos and early Dish DVRs were also the only ones that allowed you to extract recorded programs to your PC. The Tivo required hacking to enable this but the Dish drive had to be physically removed and installed in the PC to perform the task.
Many other DVRs have come and gone but the Tivo has persevered. Aside from the DVRs supplied by the cable and DSS providers, they are about the only game left in town other than an HTPC and a Moxi.