Magnavox 537, 535, 533, 515, 513, 2160A, 2160, 2080 & Philips 3576, 3575 - Page 281

Doesn't seem like it would be worth putting it out of commission and using an old HD from the tivo when new drives are so inexpensive nowadays? You might be able to sell the tivo, if you're not going to use it anymore.

Not that it wouldn't be an interesting experiment!

Guys,

Looks like wajo needs to devise yet a super AON or something like that! last time I did an AON and rescanned the 2160A, all of my Time Warner QAM channels were found. Fast forward to today, some of them were gone ! so I entered a block of the primary channels manually (since I expected they are in that range 120 - 130), and rescanned. They were not found. I repeated this a couple times, no luck.

I've noticed that some were still there (even they are in xxx.2 or above range, for example 127.2). Now I'm thoroughly confused! could be the missing ones were moved so far from the previous primary channels? I plan to repeat another complete AON, however if this happens too many times, it seems to be a waste of time to chase after some crazy scheme that TWC seems to be using. A moving target that is.

Artwire,
I had thought about that, but I got the TiVo for free from AT&T 3 years ago and since it's only a series 2, SD, I doubt I really get anything for it. Opening that baby up would give me something to do other than my "Honey, do" list.
Ghpr13

fwiw, my 2160A's fan is very quiet....barely noticeable in a quiet room from about 10 feet away....and i am probably more sensitive to that sort of thing than most other people would be....

so maybe your fan is somehow vibrating the case (as was suggested) and thats causing most of the noise? if so, that might be an ez thing to remedy if u open it up and re-seat things, etc....

most likely moved them to SDV

I'm not sure SDV explains this, because the channel I was looking for is still the same on TV tuner. For example, channel 125.1 still on the TV, the 2160A previously tuned this as 125.2. But now scanning the whole block 120 - 130, the 2160A could not find it.

Have any of you who upgraded from the factory 160GB drive ever encountered a Divide/Edit glitch?

Three of our five Funai recorders have had the kind of glitches that are commonly ascribed to a Divide problem. On these I avoid Divide as much as possible.

The two that have not had any issues were upgraded with 2.5" drives last year, and despite more editing on them than any of the others, they have been glitch-free. I no longer worry about Divide and Edit with these two.

It was concerns about the Funai power supply which prompted me to upgrade with 2.5" 500GB 8MB cache drives because they were lower power and lower heat than the original 160GB from the factory. Wajo speculated at the time that "5400 rpm drives can operate well, but then you *might* notice some slowdown in your SKIP times and similar 'random access' functions, esp. as your HDD gets increasingly fragmented".

After almost a year of experience on two highly fragmented recorders these concerns have not proven true yet.

Hi guys,

I've just received this dvr, and it will not allow me to record to the hard drive. It tells me "cannot record to this hdd" E48.

It also will not allow me to access the sub menus 3-8 under general settings. Is this operator error or a bad unit?

Thanks!

It would be nice for people that have a hearing problem to be able to turn on closed captioning. Most Cable and VCR recorded programs have CC and can be turned on during playback. A button added on the remote would work best.

We have five recorders, and as 3.5" upgrades are half the cost of the 2.5" already done on two of them, I started researching for upgrade possibilities that used less power than the factory installed HDDs.

The higher the Idle power the more heat a drive generates, and recorders spend more time at Idle than Operating mode. Dissipating heat may not be an issue if the recorder is on an open shelf and the recorder's fan is working. OTOH, the cabinet in our family room became so hot inside that I installed a pair of temperature-controlled fans at the rear. After both recorders were upgraded to 2.5" 500GB drives with an Idle power spec of 0.85W the in-cabinet temperature has dropped to the point where the fans seldom operate any more.

Heat is generated in direct proportion to power used, and according to http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/storage/hddpower.html "Each one-degree [celsius] drop of HDD temperature is equivalent to a 10% increase of HDD service life". We all have a vested interest in extending the life of our recorders, and HDD power is something we can control to achieve that.

The best way to reduce a 3.5" drive's power profile is to use a manufacturer's utility e.g. Hitachi's Feature Tool. FT allows a user to set generic operational parameters of the ATA Set Features command, and works on all manufacturer's drives except Samsung (which has its own utility). The Set Feature AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) function has 128 granular settings. The lowest setting can cut operational power consumption by up to 20%, which means less heat and a lower draw on the power supply. Since the actual effect of an AAM setting is vendor-dependent, there is no way of knowing whether AAM can knock the power usage of 500GB drives to below that of 160GB drives. Note: Thanks to tmwalsh0 I have learned that Hitachi dropped AAM support in Rev 2.13 but fortunately, 2.11 is still available at other sites e.g. http://www.ddown.org/2008/08/05/ibm-...ture-tool-211/

SamOntario's install of a 640GB WD6400AACS drew my attention to Western Digital's line of Green HDDs that spin at or around 5400 rpm and use about 2/3 the power of desktop PC HDDs. According to comments on the web the Green drives are silent (good) and sluggish (bad) in a boot drive and as the Funai is not a boot drive, the latter is not a concern.

Hitachi's datasheets of CinemaStar (HC prefix) low-power HDDs specify maximum startup power, not Operating mode power. CinemaStar drives are not as readily available as WD Green, and only a few examples are included in the table with a * instead of OpW.

21 of 24 WD's Green drives up to 2TB in capacity use less power in both Operating and Idle modes than the factory-installed drives. Remember that no matter which drive you install, the usable capacity is limited to 500GB.

The AA and EA drives are PC desktop, the AV and EV drives are AudioVisual. WD's AV series was designed for video treaming/editing applications in design studios. WD chose to cater to the video editing companies with the AV line and pushed for the AV commands in the ATA standard. There is far more to the AV series than reduced power, there are error handling differences for the intended applications. WD write that the AV line is "Designed for demanding audio and video environments", and the Funai is anything but a demanding environment. Since there is no benefit to the AV drives over the PC desktop models, go with the cheapest you can find on the day you decide to upgrade.

The last table is for comparison purposes, and shows that the typical 500GB PC-class drives have power needs that far exceed the factory install. It is worth noting that those members who upgraded with such drives have not yet reported encountering any issues as a conseqence of doing so.

Some concerns have been expressed on the web about using the WD Green drives in RAID applications because SMART reports high cycle counts. It is more speculation than reports of failures, and it occurs because Green drives adopted the techniques of 2.5" drives to reduce power usage. The only 500GB WD Green which has been reported as being of concern is the AADS model. WD has info in their FAQ and a utility to resolve the issue.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....p?p_faqid=5357
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....p?p_faqid=3263

WD drives are designed to reduce power consumption, in part by positioning the heads in a park position (unloading the heads) and turning off unnecessary electronics, resulting in substantial power savings. WD defines this mode as Idle 3.

Unix or RAID applications which poll the availability of a drive by issuing a media access command to the disk every 30 seconds are going to trigger a power cycle condition because the Green drive default is to go to Standby after 8 seconds of inactivity. The WDIDLE3.EXE utility lets these users to disable the timer, or set it to any value between 8 and 300 seconds.

WD allowed for higher cycle counts in the design of the drives. The typical cycle count on 3.5" PC drives is 50,000 takeoffs/landings. The Green drives are spec'd at 300,000 and WD claims that the "drive has been validated to 1 million load/unload cycles without issue".

The power savings are real and relieve the risk of higher wattage large capacity drives causing the Funai power supply to fail. Heat kills electronics, and these Green drives are way cooler than any other high capacity drive, especially at Idle which is where the Green drives excel.

An objective perspective comes from the drive data recovery companies, which are not seeing high incidents of failure in WD Green drives. In fact, dataclinic writes "Courtesy of perpendicular recording methods, Western Digital's 'GreenPower' hard drives offer large storage capacities, low power consumption & good general reliability."

Warning: One reservation that applies to all new SATA models does not relate to power saving techniques, but to sector size. Drive vendors have been planning to migrate from 512 to 4096 byte physical sectors for a long time. On drives that have 4096 byte sectors, odd-boundary 512-byte transfers require manipulation. In the Green drive series only the EARS drives are "Advanced Format".

OS vendors have had years to prepare for this shift but in typical ostrich fashion have chosen to ignore it. Read http://hothardware.com/Articles/WDs-...Pay-Attention/ for a wakeup call.

The large sector drives can simulate 512-byte operation by doing sector manipulation, and that can slow things down. It would be best to avoid using them in the Funai recorders.

Officemax has them for $0.18 this week - I assume they're inferior but since same brand as 2160 I thought worth a check for feedback here?

Thanks...

I understand that the fact that they're 16x should be a strike against them.

It would be interesting to see the MID, as I doubt Magnavox makes their own media.
Whatever the MID though, I would not trust media that cheap.

From a 2006 post at afterdawn:

Quote:I just bought a 50 pack for 24.99 at OFFICEMAX(buy 1 get 1)and the MID is CMC MAG M01

another source

CMC MAG. AM3

Z

CMC used to be junk. Then I heard they got better, but I'll stick with TY.

sydyen - Could you explain why in this application there is no benefit to the AV drives over the AA drives? is that because of the transfer rates, that the Philip/Mag and other HDD recorders require, are much lower? Thanks.

I just finished upgrading my 3575 with a WD PATA Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKB, the same drivre auskck used for his first upgrade. Took about 15 minutes, following the great "instructions" from auskck in message #4216, with no problems. The unit is now doing some test recording.

A couple of comments on the installation, and one item that should be added to the instructions

First, all the screws that had to be removed were screwed down incredibly tight. Getting a good match to the size of the Phillips bit was crucial to removing them without stripping the heads.

The best screwdriver turned out to be the one with the longest shank, since it applied the most torque to the screw. The worst/tightest screws were those holding the original drive to its internal mounting bracket, and the ground strip - about which more next

Second, auskck did not mention the steel grounding strip screwed to the side of my original drive. Its presence needs to be mentioned in the instructions! The screw holding it was the tightest of all - took me about 5 min to break it loose initially. Don't forget to re-install it.

Thanks to all for the great write-ups!

syden 8420:
The best way to reduce a drive's power profile is to download the Hitachi Feature Tool from http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm - FT allows a user to set generic operational parameters of the ATA Set Features command, and works on all manufacturer's drives except Samsung (which has its own utility). The Set Feature AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) function has 128 granular settings, and FT lets you choose Off, Loud, Medium or Almost Silent.

From the Hitachi web page:

Features in Version 2.13

* Removed the function of acoustic management.
....
Ummh, the feature you recommend to reduce power usage is supposedly removed.

Or did I misinterpret?

tom

Like I said: careful. The display of a channel number is arbitrary. The actual frequency is all that matters. And then we could speak of virtual channel numbers, compression, and (black hole) PSIP tables. I would bet though that the maximum subchannels is 255 or 127 since that would make a nice hex number. The 99 number is ok for a display, but not so nice for programming. But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong again.

Hitachi seems to be offering windows-centric s/w.... (hrumph) ... Then again, I'm kind of thinking that drives intended for use in video equipment should be formatted by the video equipment, not a computer (regardless of OS flavor) - because (guessing here) using it with a computer probably leaves behind things that ought not be there. A nice clean factory fresh drive seems the way to go when upgrading, don't you think?

By the way,speaking of swapping drives, the hardware store guy looked at me like I was nuts when I told him I needed a #2 Pozidriv screwdriver. He handed me a phillips, but I explained it was for a drive with foreign screws that would be easiest to remove with the pozidriv since it had the extra ridges ... he wasn't buying it. I think I need to find a new hardware store... (or shop online -- didn't do that because I was in a hurry. Oh, the irony..)

call Fishers in Springfield

Yes, and reliability also. Hitachi states that the MTBF of their AV drives is a targeted 1.2 million hours MTBF and WD claims 1 million hours.

One sentence from WD's site hammers home the performance point.

- SilkStream - Optimized for smooth, continuous digital video playback of up to twelve simultaneous HD streams [Host Transfer Block size of 2 MB per stream].

Our recorders support one stream of SD, and SD needs 1/4 the data of HD. In effect, our Funai recorders can get by with an HDD that has only 1/48 the transfer capability of an AV drive. - SilkStream is compatible with the ATA streaming command set so CE customers can use standard streaming management and error recovery options.

- Preemptive Wear Leveling (PWL) - The drive arm frequently sweeps across the disk to reduce uneven wear on the drive surface common to audio video streaming applications.

As you can tell already, AV capabilities come with fancy names, and I like Hitachi's CoolSpin which as far as I can tell is a euphemism for rotating at 5400 instead of 7200 rpm. That cuts the head rate by 30% so to sustain the kind of rates video implementors want some tweaks are made to the way data is transferred. You can see that influence in the names and descriptions culled here from a CinemaStar datasheet.

- Thermal Fly-height Control (TFC): Better soft error rate for improved reliability and performance

- SMART Command Transport (SCT) Adaptive error correction for optimum video delivery....provides time-limited error recovery and thermal monitoring capabilities

- SmoothStream technology supports the ATA-7 streaming command set...for...improved handling of high-quality video streams

- AV-Zoning allows the definition of various error recovery procedures for predefined ranges of data blocks, or zones.

- Read Continuous mode helps manage error recovery for video streams

- CE features set: Improved handling of high-quality video streams

- Media Maintenance enhancements help prevent track wear-out from around-the-clock operation.

Dropping back into the past, Seagate's ACE (CE = Consumer and Entertainment) drives dominated DVR applications, they were used across the board by Sony, Pioneer, Panasonic, Toshiba, et al. In some cases, only one drive could be used in a DVR e.g. the Toshiba XS34 would work with nothing but a ST3160022ACE and my 80GB XS32s would upgrade with a ST3160022ACE but nothing else. Although Hitachi FT let you turn a ST3160022A into a quasi-ST3160022ACE, the XS32 and XS34 would reject it. OTOH, the XS35 could take any PATA drive of any size so the ST3160022ACEs in them went into the XS32s and were replaced with a mix of Maxtor/WD/IBM/Seagate/120GB/250GB/300GB drives out of retired PCs. Seagate's ACE drives sold under the umbrella of the DB35 series were only sold OEM, supported the streaming command set, and were pre-configured as a quiet drive.

Similarly, Maxtor tweaked their DiamondMax drives to come up with a QuickView line that supported ATA-7's streaming commands and was designated silent. Maxtor provided an AMSET utility which let you convert a DiamondMax into a quasi QuickView. AMSET came with the warning that "Drive performance can be affected when Acoustic Management is enabled" and disappeared after Seagate bought Maxtor.

ACE and Quickview drives sold at a premium over A and DiamondMax drives on the open market. Although Funai introduced their recorders with ACE drives, their implementation does not appear to rely on the advanced streaming command set functions because as upgrades have proven, any desktop drive will drop in and function. This implies that they went with the ACE originally for quieter operation. Presumably they added Hitachi later because it worked just as well, and being a no-frills desktop PC drive it cost less.

In summary, the Funai has been implemented without dependencies on the AV command set, and a current-generation HDD has more than enough performance to meet the recording burden.

Phew, a bit long-winded here, got carried away with reminiscing.

Damn! Don't know how that can be misinterpreted.

The latest download I did was 2.11 in 10/2008 and the description of functions says: "Change the drive automatic acoustic management settings. - Lowest acoustic emanation setting (quiet seek mode) or maximum performance level (normal seek mode)."

You can still get 2.11 online, it is available at http://www.ddown.org/2008/08/05/ibm-...ture-tool-211/ and maybe at other sites as well.

Thanks for the ping, I'll update my previous post in order to lead no one else astray.

A few GUI alternatives I have not tried are:

WinAAM http://www.driversdown.com/drivers/W....9_86862.shtml is a German utility that runs under W2K, Xp and Vista

HDDScan http://hddscan.com/ does way more than acoustic management and runs under W2K, XP and Server 2003

Hard Disk Sentinel http://www.hdsentinel.com/ is an all-purpose utility that comes in several versions. The free version is display-only but the $35 Pro version lets you do way more, and amongst them is control AAM. It supports all versions of Windows plus Linux and can be any kind of drive (PATA, SATA, USB, SCSI, SAS).

artwire, you appear to be confusing the ability to change a drive's operating parameters with the formatting a drive. The two are nothing alike, and you cannot draw parallels between them. Specifically:


NO to the hrumph, FT is command-line DOS, not Windows.


The drive IS formatted by the video equipment (SKIP 079/HDD FORMAT/Enter)


A Format does NOT leave behind things that ought not be there.


After you modify the AAM of a nice clean factory fresh drive it REMAINS a nice clean factory fresh drive i.e. nothing is written to the media.


NO.

@sydyen -

Wajo,

In an earlier post you wrote:

"2/2/10 - Mickboy found a source for the 2160 DVD burner and mated CBA (PCB) board... at Funai... duh! Parts@funaiservice.com

He verified that the PN for the 2160 burner is N78F8EUN, an 8X burner, and the cost is $67.99, which includes shipping AND the mated CBA/PCB board, which is calibrated for each mated drive.

That same burner PN should also work in the 2160A. In fact, it *might* even work in the 3575, 3576 and 2080, even tho the original burner for those models is a 4X, PN N78F4DUN. Note that each burner PN has either a "4" or an "8" prob. indicating its rated speed (4X or 8X)..."

I've bold faced the text that may point to a complication when using the 2160 DVD Drive and its CBA assembly in a 2160A.

Perhaps the DVD Drive used in the 2160 and 2160A might be identical, I don't know. The complication might be that the 2160A uses a different CBA assembly to support the SATA hard drive in the "A" model.

The 2160 Service Manual at page 1/21/1 shows the DVD MECHANISM & DVD/HDD MAIN CBA ASSEMBLY as part no. N78F8EUN.

The 2160A Service Manual at page 1-21-1 shows the DVD MECHANISM & DVD/HDD MAIN CBA ASSEMBLY as part no. N78F0FUN.

That raises an interesting question. Will the installation of a model 2160 DVD MECHANISM & DVD/HDD MAIN CBA ASSEMBLY N78F8EUN convert a Magnavox 2080 or Philips 3575/3576 into a Magnavox 2160?