Quiet Please... how to make the TiVo be quiet at night?

Forums › TiVo › Quiet Please... how to make the TiVo be quiet at night?

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1081 posts

Uber Geek

#636395 5-Jun-2012 22:11

Don't bother, the stock HDD AAM setting is 128, which is the lowest it can be set. I had the stock drive on my desk so I just plugged it in and had a look.

Batman

Mad Scientist
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#636400 5-Jun-2012 22:14

those who can't hear anything must be deaf ;p

there is a spinning hard drive ... that never ever stops spinning ... hence there will be noise (if you can't hear it doesn't mean there is no noise ... err ... right??)

so the only way is to not use tivo ... tivo to me is like the iphone of PVRs - like it or hate it ...

mattwnz

20141 posts

Uber Geek

#636405 5-Jun-2012 22:20

joker97: those who can't hear anything must be deaf ;p

there is a spinning hard drive ... that never ever stops spinning ... hence there will be noise (if you can't hear it doesn't mean there is no noise ... err ... right??)

so the only way is to not use tivo ... tivo to me is like the iphone of PVRs - like it or hate it ...

perhaps you have a noisy one, bad bearings, or it is being amplified by the surface it is on. The only time I head mine is when the arm is moving, possibily when it is recording and transferring. The only thing I do hear sometimes is the fan, but certainly not the harddrive.

GeoffisPure

459 posts

Ultimate Geek

#636457 6-Jun-2012 06:53

I hear mine during the night too. At first I was annoyed by it and considered switching it off at the wall every night, but the start up time was extremely off-putting. Now I've just learnt to deal with it and although I hear it, it doesn't stop me sleeping. The noise I hear is the sound of writing to the hard drive.

Dulouz

883 posts

Ultimate Geek

#636458 6-Jun-2012 06:56

Our's gets noisy sometimes as the front panel starts to vibrates, just need to give it a wee whack and it comes right.

Amanon

Gilco2

1556 posts

Uber Geek

#636459 6-Jun-2012 07:10

my media centre pc I built sometimes wakes me when it starts up at night. It has fanless power supply and fanless cpu and western digital green power and samsung drive and laptop drive with operating system. In a Antec case with rubber vibration mounts.
It is only the hard drive able to make a noise

Yet the Tivo with fan and same type western digital drive is extremely quiet

HTPC Intel Pentium G3258 cpu, Gigabyte H97n-wifi motherboard, , 8GB DDR3 ram, onboard graphics. Hauppuage HVR 5500 tuner, Silverstone LC16M case, Windows 10 pro 64 bit using Nextpvr and Kodi

old3eyes

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#636476 6-Jun-2012 08:50

GeoffisPure: I hear mine during the night too. At first I was annoyed by it and considered switching it off at the wall every night, but the start up time was extremely off-putting. Now I've just learnt to deal with it and although I hear it, it doesn't stop me sleeping. The noise I hear is the sound of writing to the hard drive.

Also if you turn it off over nite there's no EPG update. I believe this happens at about 2.00am.. My wife has great hearing but she can't hear our one. The Popcornhour HD is a different story..

Regards,

Old3eyes

Equinox IT

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DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#636481 6-Jun-2012 08:59

Morning all... snow in Christchurch is morning.

Closer look (well listen) and I'm wondering if the ticking sound is coming from the fan. I'm thinking top off and some silicon spray on the fan.

Seems there's a few TiVo experts here that have had the cover off these things in the past, so feed back on this idea is welcome.

D

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DanHybrid

112 posts

Master Geek

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Hybrid TV (TiVo)

#636484 6-Jun-2012 09:03

Hi Guys,
Still early here, so I apologize if I am incoherent.

Of course my recommendation is to leave it running 24/7 as that requires the least amount of fiddling.

To be honest, I am not sure if standby mode (as mentioned above) if it will wake up and collect EPG at it's appointed time or not, but, if you want to go down that path, you could always set it in standby at night, and in the morning as you are caffinating, wake it, and force a connection to collect the EPG

messages and settings -> settings -> network -> connect now

D

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#636512 6-Jun-2012 10:05

Hey Dan,

Have to say I'm very impressed with this product given the price point so far.

As you're about, a little feed back and a few questions if you don't mind....

1. Noise - I think some perspective is needed here. My wife is very sensitive to any noises at night. Being realistic, I don't think this thing makes any undue noise, it's just that she's way more sensitive to this stuff than I think most people are and I suspect what I'd like is just an unreasonable expectation.

2. Networking - the thing seems very slow. It takes minutes to load the service connection as suggested above. What's it doing that it's so slow?

I also couldn't make the thing work with a wired network. When doing the initial set up it froze and I couldn't get it to find the network. I plugged in the supplied wifi dongle and got it to work but not on our newer .n AP. It would find the AP but wouldn't get an IP address. Though I'm not 100% sure it even athenticated the wifi correctly. I couldn't find anything that would let me see what's going on at a technical level.

3. mytivo web site - very very cool site. I like the functionality a lot. Site seems very slow though. The guide is slow to load when you move from day to day and requesting a recording seems slow and it takes an age to log in, and also session time logs out to soon and doesn't seem to 'remember' me at all, even though I keep ticking the box.

I get that it's a free service, so what can one really expect? The obvious expectation is a faster subscription service option?

4. Update time. With a 1Gb per month data plan on a 256/64k dsl plan I really cared about stuff that requests updates all the time when it really didn't need to.... but today I have a 100/10mbit service with 100Gb of data. Why does it take an hour for the record requests to sync up? I'd have no issue if my TiVo did a sync request every 10 minutes.

Again, I know the obvious answer is the load on your network, but again, how about a more resourced paid service? I'd be happy to pay $12 a year (a dollar a month).

5. Online content - had a good look though this and the concept is very cool. I confess I've yet to purchase and yet to set up CASPA, so I'm still wondering how quickly the content will stream in. If the guide updating is anything to go by then I guess I'm not going to like the answer. We'll find out.

Why does it take 24 hours before I can use it? That's just stupid.

Where is the content hosted? I see myTiVo is coming from Bullet Proof in Australia. Is the content held in New Zealand for New Zealanders? This one is quite important to me as I have unlimited national traffic on one of my services.

Is TiVo looking at other ISP partners? I see you can get uncounted data from Telecom, but what about others?

The price point of the online content is also wrong in my view. I couldn't find trailers for each movie, are those there and did I just miss them? I would expect that I could view a trailer for free for what ever I'm interested in. That might entice me to do more about signing up for Caspa.

I couldn't find any cheap on ramping content. By the time I pay $1 per gig for my data, $2 for a show is expensive when I consider it's competing with FTA and the fact I can get DVD's at the local library for $1 for 7 days.

The data cost is not a big issue, but when the content is twice as expensive on line then it gets to be a deal breaker.

6. DLNA / Home networking - I looked at the home networking kit thing on the web site. I'm not interested in the content on my phone, laptop or tablet. I'm typing to you on my laptop while I watch a program on my TV and I use my phone to change the channel, not watch the content.

Is there DLNA in this thing that I've missed? We've got a number of DLNA TV's in the house now and I'd ideally like to be able to pull content off the TiVo using the DLNA client in the TVs, not have to have more power consuming hardware in the house.

One might argue that you'd want to sell me a TiVo for each TV to make your money. I'm happy to pay the other $100 for the software option if it will just do what I want it to do.

7. Phone remote - the phone based remote is cool. What I really want to be able to do is program recordings from my phone and see details of what's on my TiVo that I can watch. I get that I can use the remote to display this info on my TV. I don't want to interrupt family viewing while I just choose programs to be recorded and look for something we're going to watch next.

Anyway, I'm sure if I read these forums I'm sure I'll find many of these suggestions and questions have been asked before by other users. But I thought I'd just consolidate my initial thoughts as a new user for consideration. Hope this help you guys to bring more value and enhance your business.

D

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Skolink

1081 posts

Uber Geek

#636515 6-Jun-2012 10:10

It's just a standard (albeit quiet / low RPM) computer fan. You'll need a T10 torx screw driver though.
For the fan to be making a ticking noise, perhaps the blades are brushing on some dust. A bad bearing would make a different noise. Perhaps it is a bad HDD, but I think you would have seen (on screen) other symptoms.

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#636525 6-Jun-2012 10:23

Dan, snow here in Christchurch today... wife just came in and asked how we order a DVD on line that we can all watch... "that's not the answer I want to hear" when I just told her CASPA would be 24 hours away.

Yes, I totally agree this was my fault for not getting it set up on Monday when I got the unit, but the OOBE took long enough as it was.

paypal intergration would be nice as well. more and more I'm buying stuff on line just using paypal.

D

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DanHybrid

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#636530 6-Jun-2012 10:30

Hi Don,

I will get back to your other questions shortly (My workstation's system drive has decided to spit the dummy, and I'm a little limited right now)

For getting CASPA working, as long as you have set up your CASPA account online, force a few connections (only the first will likely be slow - more on that later) and you should be ok.

The back end is quite a collection of systems, and it can take a little while to all sync up.

*PM me your user email address or TSN and I can check my end if you have issues.

Dan

Skolink

1081 posts

Uber Geek

#636531 6-Jun-2012 10:33

I thought it was more like 'up to' 24 hours, for initial setup anyway. I think some people reported theirs working within the hour. Maybe CASPA is the same, I've not used it myself. I'm heasitant to load money on that I might not be able to spend.

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#636545 6-Jun-2012 10:52

Dan thanks. Got the credit card, off to look at it now... sorry, as a bit busy just getting slow off the 'shade' sales in the back yard, go figure!

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