Moxi HD DVR - Page 183

The original drives are destined to fail just be reading the posts around here. I'm just not sure I want Moxi to put the same darn drive back in there for $179. It's much more cost effective to do it ourselves...and upgrade the storage at the same time. I think I'm just going to chance doing the repair myself. What does everyone else think?

A good number of us have upgraded the drive ourselves.

Just practice good common sense when upgrading.

-Be careful when inside the Moxi box. Just focus on the SATA, SATA Power cable and drive mounts. Be careful not to touch anything else especially the power supply.

-Make sure you have a direct connection to your router. Have a secondary backup router just in case the 4FP does not work with the first one. (borrow from a friend or a store)

-Get another drive in addition to the one you are using as replacement so you can have a backup.. just in case Moxi disable the 4fp. So you have the second drive as an emergency backup.

-Take your time ..

I'm not too worried about replacing the drive. I've built several computers over the years. I'm not sure I want to get an extra drive just in case the 4FP is disabled though. If another drive fails and they disable the 4FP, it will be time to move on to another DVR solution. Don't want to sink too much money in the Moxi.

Basically, yes. I had to decide whether to repair my Moxi's power supply or ditch the unit given that I had just performed a FFP install of a 1 TB drive to replace a just failed HD. I replaced the PS's rectifier and I'm happy I did it given the crappy CC boxes I rented until I fixed my Moxie.


When one performs a FFP install of the Moxi OS from thei server among other things is the creation of a unique identifier for the unit to circumvent potential subversion of any recorded copyrighted media. This unique identifier is sent to Arris to distinguish the unit; users (accounts) can own more than one Moxi.

Yes, it happened to me when I needed to have my unit's power supply repaired. My suggestion:
1) Take present HD and make a back-up image to another 500 GB drive.
2)Do a 4FP with the new 2 TB drive following Acaocao's great advice a few posts above.

My drive died suddenly without much warning after 2 satisfactory years. I wouldn't press the matter though clearly Arris is attempting, however sleazily, to back away from the product. The name of the game is to be like Cuba; use every trick in the book to keep our units running. Good luck.

J

Point taken. The guide is one thing and is essential for week-to-week functioning of the Moxi. The 4FP can be liquidated by Arris without much fanfare and will only be discovered perhaps months after its removal by some poor soul attemtping to replace their unit's drive.

J

Admittedly, it is niche despite the FFC's encouragement to the otherwise. It is a rather curious phenomenon in a world of crap CC provided equipment and the convergence of the Internet/over-the-air/wireless universe. I'm convinced that if one took a CableCard-based DVR, stuck it in a white box and put an Apple logo on it you'd sell them by the bizzillions. Even that POS Apple TV unit, still with 720P resolution, sells.

I just received my TWC NY cable bill after returning the two boxes I was renting while I repaired my Moxi. The cost saving is palpable.

yes, it has. forget support after that. then again, you can pay moxi $180 every 1.5 years for a hdd for support. if your setup hasnt been touched for a while..you shouldnt need it

Since you guys are planning to upgrade your drive.. how about take an image for us?!

image of the inside was taken early in the post.

Drive image.. ghost image..

i understand what youre saying now. an image is tied to each specific box. taking an image wont work on our box. ive tried it and no luck.

I think my HD might be going bad on my 2 tuner Moxi... My resent recordings since I watched all my older recordings and freed up space on my HD have bad breakup during playback. It freezes and skips very 5 seconds? I rebooted the moxi and it passed the HD check at boot up? Can I hook up an external and force it to use it?

No. You have to use an internal drive as a primary drive. The external drive is only a secondary drive.

Instructions on how to replace a drive is here.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1303511

i think i saw someone do this. check this post to see if it is of interest: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...1303511&page=3

The biggest problem with the Moxi is that it is very hard on hard drives. The unit is constantly buffering all tuners and they don't do it in an inefficient manner. When I originally upgraded my Moxi, I had tried several 5400 rpm drives. All of them encountered freezes when fast forwarding. All of those drives in theory should have supported playback with 6 streams being recorded.

In any case a Seagate 1.5Tb 5900RPM drive ended up working. Unfortunately, I got less than 2 years out of it before the drive suffered a complete failure. I lost all my recordings but the drive was still under warranty so it only cost me $10 under the advanced replacement plan to replace it. That sure beats paying to ship it back to Moxi and paying them $150 for a 500GB drive when you can get a 2TB even now with inflated hd prices, for around $100 with a 3 year warranty that are pretty much guaranteed to take advantage of.

Thank you for the link... very good reading there.

Couldn't the sata connectors be switched so that sata1 goes to the external port? How would the Moxi know the difference?

So, when the service stoppage notice was posted (and I had finally gotten my Moxi to work well enough with TW Austin and SDV that I was going to ditch the TW box and buy a second mate to replace it), I was as disappointed to say the least. This reminded me of the ReplayTV community and the replacement for the guide service there (Wirns?), so I sniffed the Moxi's network connection to the mothership. So far, I'm not that hopeful that we would be able to replace the guide service - the epg guide data is sent to the Moxi encrypted and signed/hashed. On the plus side, none of the conversations themselves are encrypted - it all appears to be DNS, NTP or port 8080 http traffic. Most of the http traffic requires authorization from the Moxi servers, but it doesn't look like the Moxi proper requires the authorization (as I assume if the server just returned the data on the first try instead of telling it to try again with authorization, the Moxi would be happy with it). It looks like the Moxi checks for mail, branding information, station logos and the epg data. At least that was all that I found in my logs for overnight while idle.

I don't need Arris to fix my Moxi if it breaks; I can do that with some elbow grease, tools, and 3rd party parts. What I want to know is if the 4-finger press to download the software to a new drive will be supported as long as guide is...

It wouldn't but forget your warranty. I suggest voiding warranty for those that have OEM drive because that will fail so better to just get a good hard drive right away as the future is uncertain as far as software download.

Yes.. You can do this.. but I do not really see any benefit to this other than... keeping the drive outside the box? Are you routing the power outside as well?

right, im keeping everything inside the box. but to each his/her own.

I was just referring to digitalknight's question about forcing it to use an external drive. I already replaced my failed internal drive.

Ugh -- I think one of my external HDD enclosures is going bad, and my supplier doesn't have any more of the ones that have worked for me.

I remembered Bryan had posted that he doesn't use enclosures at all & found the above -- does anyone have any updates to that process or parts? How about a picture of the whole thing put together?

And/or, can anyone share enclosures they've had success using?


Many TIAs,
Saundra

Sandra,

You just need two items..

They are listed in my post here
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...4#post19862694


Keep in mind you still need to buy a harddrive as well.

Thanks! No fan for cooling? I thought there needed to be a fan? The external drive is fine -- it's the fan in the enclosure that seems to be failing. If a fan isn't needed, then I just need a power adapter since I've got several SATA to eSATA cables laying around

My Aluminum HDD Cooler and fans drop the Ext HDD temp from ~140° to ~90°

I am pretty cheap... So I rather just be basic with the drive. I lay the bare drive on top of two hard small plastic (anything around the house) pieces to allow air flow on the bottom of the drive.

But correct no fans... just power and sata to esata cable.... No problems... I installed it in Nov 2009.

Bryan method problably safer but require more parts

As a Moxi owner following this thread, the posts about the discontinued sales have concerned me. I have enjoyed the mentions about the Ceton line of products, since there could be a strong possibility that I may purchase one of their products, so I started following Ceton on twitter (cetoncorp). Today, I saw they are having a sale on their InfiniTV 4 PCIe card and InfiniTV 4 USB. I've seen where several people here appeared to have an interest in this system, so I wanted to share with those that are. Here's the link from the twitter page:

http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=...&id=5a0416b8ce