When I ordered a WD10EVDS drive to upgrade my Tivo HD, I was aware of the hanging soft reboot issue with drives manufactured after October 2009. The drive I received was manufactured in December 2009. Before putting the drive into service, I disabled the Intellipark feature that is reportedly causing the issue. I used the wdidle3.exe program from Western Digital to disable it based on info posted at as a guideline. I deviated from the instructions posted on the forum by putting the wdidle3.exe program on a bootable USB drive rather than a bootable CD. Also, the instructions stated that running "wdidle3 /D" would disable Intellipark. This did NOT work on my WD10EVDS drive. However, I experimented and found that running "wdidle3 /S0" did successfully disable the Intellipark feature. I had no issues executing the actual drive upgrade instructions shown on the same forum page. I used a USB/SATA adapter to connect the Tivo drives while running the WinMFS program. I verified that the Tivo does not hang during soft reboots.I recommend this drive for Tivo HD upgrade only if you are computer savvy. I suspect that most folks willing to tackle a Tivo drive upgrade also have enough computer experience to disable Intellipark. The hardest part of disabling the Intellipark feature was creating bootable media to run wdidle3.exe. The instructions posted on the forum implied (or at least I inferred) that simply burning the ISO image to a CD would create a bootable disk. This was not my experience. None of the system files required for bootable media were present on the ISO. At that point I elected to put wdidle3.exe on a DOS bootable USB drive that I created.
I am VERY satisfied with this drive. It is extremely quiet and has performed well to date. I plan to purchase another WD10EVDS to upgrade a second Tivo HD unit.
This is exactly the drive to buy for a TiVO HD or Series 3. 1Tb is the simple size limit. There are incredibly detailed instructions on how to do the swap at TiVO Community. Critical pieces, you need Torx #10 and #15 drivers to open the case and remove the hard drive from the bracket.
There's one small nuance with this drive, it is a Green drive so it has a firmware setting that makes it slow down or idle when it is not in use. If this setting is not disabled, any time you restart the TiVO from the Settings Menu, it will not start properly. Simply unplugging the TiVO and plugging it back in will work just fine. It causes absolutely no other issues if you can live with restart by unplugging, don't bother with the firmware setting.
The hard part of fixing the firmware is finding a computer with SATA that can boot from a DOS CD. Once you download wdidle with the bootable CD image, burn the CD, connect the drive to a spare SATA port, boot the computer from that CD, and type in the correct run string; the fix is incredibly simple. I think it took about 30 seconds to fix the idle setting.
Using the copy tools listed at TiVO Community couldn't be easier. It's scary when the instructions are accurate to the letter. The place where the software is posted is kind of ancient and requires registration. It took about an hour or two before I finally got the registration activation email. It's a good idea to download all this before you open up your TiVO.
If you've ever upgraded a graphics card on a PC, you can very easily do this job. The cheapest path is to use a stray SATA port on your computer and not monkey with SATA to USB adapters. However, if you don't want to open your computer case, the adapters work just fine.
Opening the TiVO is pretty easy. There are a set of #10 Torx screws on the back. The cover pops off easily. You'll be amazed how little stuff is inside a TiVO. I was also surprised my 3 year old TiVO wasn't full of dust bunnies it was amazingly clean. The SATA / power supply secure connector pops right of the hard drive. Four #10 Torx screws hold the drive bracket down. Flip that over and four #15 Torx screws hold the drive to the bracket (there are rubber grommets to quiet the drive somewhat). Reverse all that with the new drive. Plug in the TiVO and it will be back up like new.
Honestly, the most difficult part of this project, trying to decide when to unmarry my extender from my TiVO. You lose all your recorded programs when you do this. There is no way around it. If you want to keep any programs, you have to use TiVO desktop, copy them to your computer, then copy them back when you do the upgrade. There is absolutely no way to save your recorded programs otherwise.
This is an upgrade I should have done long ago. The drive is fantastic, it flat out just works. And I have a bunch more hours of HD recording now.I have a TiVo HD with My DVR Expander. "My DVR Expander" broke after 1 yr. Decided to replace the internal 160GB with this. It's awesome!
PRO:
* Taking out My DVR Expander so 1 less power cord to deal with, less clutter in area
* Lower power consumption than the 160GB drive it replaced.
* Technically, according to spec, lower noise than the orig 160GB drive.
* TiVo UI is more responsive (though possibly, it may be bec the 1 TB drive is not full yet so TiVo is not busy doing background work to optimize).
CON
* None (other than the hassle of setting up your PC to do WinMFS).
This is the right type of hard drive for this type of application (DVR).I specifically orders this HD to replace another 1TB HD (Samsung F1) in my TivoHD.
The noise level is significantly lower with the new drive.
The TiVo is in my bedroom and I can no longer hear the drive spinning. Great product so far.I originally bought this hard drive with an intention of installing it into my third generation TiVo, but this undertaking turned out to be futile for reasons that I will not go into here. I decided instead to install it into my living room media PC and thus expand its storage. This turned out to be a bit more tricky than I had anticipated, since I already had an additional internal HD installed and there were no straightforward ways of adding a third drive. With a bit of tinkering, I was able to repurpose one empty CD/DVD ROM bay, make use of an unused SATA connection on the motherboard, and after some hardware hacking (sometimes quite literal it involved the use of power tools), my slim media PC became a storage monster. The HD seems to be very quiet and has not caused any perceptible amount of extra heating. For the past few weeks that I had been using it I have also been extremely satisfied with its performance, and have not come across any issues whatsoever.
Just a couple of words of caution: this hard drive is packaged in a bare-bones package, and comes with no instructions or other information. If you have never installed an internal hard drive, you may want to get some information online about what is the best way of doing it for your compute.
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