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Seagate DB35 - Drives Built for your DVR, PVR and Consumer Electronics Devices
 
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 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. Initially, we used the Maxtor QuickView
hard drives are drives specifically manufactured for the PVR market.
In mid-2006, Seagate purchased Maxtor and with it, Maxtor's QuickView
line. In addition, Seagate has developed its own line of DVR-specific
hard drives, the DB35 line, which has been qualified in many TiVo
and other DVRs.
Seagate's DB35 drives, and Maxtor's QuickView drives have never
been available in retail stores, and can only be purchased
through authorized resellers, such as WeaKnees.com.
Seagate DB35 drives and Maxtor QuickView 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 -
QuickView 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.
More information about Maxtor QuickView drives is in this PDF.
More information about Maxtor QuickView Expander QVX drives (for
use in Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 cable boxes), see this PDF.
WeaKnees currently has QuickView drives and/or Seagate DB35 drives
in stock in 80, 160GB, 250GB, 300GB, 400GB and 500GB sizes. QuickView
Expander QVX drives come in capacities of 160GB and 300GB.
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. 
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