Are All Tivos This Noisy? (1 Viewer)

[Joel McIntosh]

Last week I bought and set-up an 80 hour Tivo. After the thing was completely set-up, the low-level noise it made drove me nuts. When my sound system was loud enough it would drown out the noise. However, there was this periodic hard disk access racket that I would hear every time my sound system hit points of low or no volume. It was terrible when I was listening to music. Soft points in the music would be accompanied by the steady chugging along of the Tivo's hard disk. I returned the thing, but I loved the Tivo service, so I'm hoping you guys can offer me some insight. (1) Did I get a defective unit, or are all of the Tivo hard drives noisy? (2) Is the Replay any quieter? (3) Is there some other way I can get the Tivo service without the noisy hard drive problem?

 

[Robert_J]

1. I can hear mine when I'm standing a few feet from it but during normal TV watching, I don't hear it. I can hear the fan kick on inside my reciever and I can hear the relays in my alarm's motion detectors so I think my hearing is at least OK.

2. If it's just hard drive noise, probably not.

3. Some people over at the Tivo Community have replaced their stock drives with larger Maxtor drives and run a "quite" utility on them. I don't know the details. You could also install it in a cabinet (with proper ventilation) or in another room.

-Robert

 

[Ken Chan]

With the ReplayTV, I can hear the fan noise when the room is quiet, but it's not an issue at all when the TV is on. There's a warranty-voiding modification you can make to lower the fan voltage. I can also hear some hard drive activity when it's doing something heavy, like deleting a bunch of stuff, but not during normal playback, and not when it's just sitting there -- no occasional reseeks like some hard drives do, although that may just be luck, depending on what brand drive they used to make that particular unit.

//Ken