Seagate DB35 DVR Specific Hard Drives

When searching for a new or additional hard drive for your TiVo (or other digital video recorder), it is critical to understand that the quality and type of drive used matters tremendously. DVR manufacturers such as TiVo, DIRECTV, ReplayTV and others spend countless hours and resources "qualifying" hard drives to ensure that they choose drives that will provide optimal performance.

Almost since its inception, WeaKnees has been using high-end drives made specifically for DVRs. We are currently using Seagate's DB35 line - developed specifically for use in DVRs - in most of our TiVos and upgrade kits. This line of drives is currently used in many production DVRs.

Seagate's DB35 drives have never been available in retail stores, and can only be purchased through authorized resellers, such as WeaKnees.com.

Seagate DB35 drives have a few key differences from normal desktop drives that make them far superior to desktop drives for PVR usage:

• Thermal Control: On board sensors monitor temperature and adjust characteristics as necessary to keep the temperature optimal.
• Durability: These drives run at 7200 RPM - more than fast enough for every PVR (providing about three times the necessary peak throughput) but not fast enough to wear out sooner.
• Acoustic Management: DVR-specific drives are specially tuned to run as quietly as possible.
• A/V Streaming: DVR-specific drives have been optimized and tuned to provide consistent data to the PVR processor. Standard desktop drives can hang while retrying drive reads - DB35 drives know to move ahead and provide more data to keep video smooth.
• Error Recovery: Desktop drives retry on errors to make sure that your Excel spreadsheet is exactly right - it's imperative. But when watching video, if one block of data is bad, you may not even notice a dark spot on one frame for 1/30th of a second. So these drives are tuned to move past errors faster, putting the stream of data as top priority. Where desktop drives often cause stutters, these drives run smooth.

More information about Seagate DB35 drives is in this PDF.
For a white paper discussing the benefits of the DB35 in DVRs, click here.

Looking for a bare drive? We sell individual, unformatted DVR-specific hard drives.

*DirecTV DVRs and Series3 TiVos (in HD) record digital broadcast streams and all compression is determined by the broadcaster, so hours stated are estimates assuming average compression. Standard Definition TiVo DVR and TiVo Upgrade Kit capacities are stated at Basic Quality. All capacities may vary due to hard drive models used. Capacities are guaranteed to be within 5% larger or smaller of stated size. Email with any questions.