Hello... I'm hoping to trundle into Brum on Saturday to pick up a 5800 from SuperFi (£250, seems the best price around unless I'm mistaken?) but stumbled across a comparison site that someone on this forum had made, the name escapes me.

Anyway, on there it mentioned the Toppy made more noise than the Humax while recording...

Is this the spin of the drive or some other buzzing type thing? It suggested there isn't a fan in the PVR (is this true?) so I'm wondering what makes the noise.

Apologies if this is in the main thread, but it's about as long as the Nile and it's take me till Saturday to read through it all...

There's no fan; some earlier versions of the box had a Seagate drive which was, in some instances, noisier than it should be. The 250Gb box is also a little louder than the 160Gb, but people have found that careful positioning has an effect on that too.

Nigel.

So you're saying if I were to buy a current 160Gb model this weekend, it would be pretty much silent? It's going in my bedroom so needs to be a bit hushed...

I have both a Toppy and a Humax. They came with the same Seagate drive, but only the Humax has a fan. I have no complaints over noise with either make. I believe the newer Toppy models come with Samsung drives, and the Samsung 160 GB model is reputed to be quieter than original Seagate model.

I bought my Toppy from the Superfi website last week and after a weekend playing with it I'm over the moon.

There is absolutely no problem with noise for me - if anyone wants to be really picky then the closest thing is that when the room is completely quiet and you strain your ears fully you might just make out a very faint clicking every 5-6 seconds from the disk drive (I think). When I first noticed this I thought it was the rain water dripping outside the window!

Mine clicks a lot, which is not heard over the television, but when the room is quiet, I can hear it very easily. I just turn it to standby, so it's no big deal, but I'm not sure why there is so much variation. I thought it might be something I had set in Jag's TAP - "remote something" setting - but I've switched that off and it still does the clicking.

The good news is it is completely silent in standby - that was a major criteria when I upgraded to this device.

Mine clicks a bit too. I guess this is disk seek noise as it only seems to occur if the machine is doing two things at once (i.e. recording one show and watching another with timeshift switched on). I have the Spinpoint drive and have put it into silent mode with the HDDInfo TAP.

Apart from these intermittent clicks I can't hear a thing. I did try picking the box up once and that reduced the "clicks" significantly so I guess there is some scope for adding a bit of extra padding under the feet.

Cheers,

Andy

I have mine placed on a Townshend isolation platform(from my HiFi days),and it is as silent as the proverbial grave!

The Toppy only makes appreciable noise when recording and playing back at the same time. Then you get the usual hard disk ticking sound. If you're just recording (even 2 things at once) then it's pretty quiet. If the room is absolutely silent you can faintly hear the disk spinning, but it really is a whole load quieter than my old VCR.

Hmm... I notice the clicks from mine most often early in the morning when nothing is recording and nothing is playing back... it's just been left on from the night before... it's not Jag's either, as it happened before I set Jag's early morning scan. It's pretty consistent... I wonder why mine does this?

If it's on and the buffer is enabled then it is recording to the drive.

Is there a sleep timer so if you're recording something you can get it to go into Standby when it's finished?

Yes, there is. Tucked away via the Opt button on the remote.

That has been my experience too. I usually notice noise only when I've rewound live TV, i.e. it's recording and playing live TV simultaneously. And in my case it's a faint thunking sound rather than clicking (I imagine it depends on the acoustic properties of whatever the Toppy is sitting on).

But overall it's a quiet machine, quieter than any VCR I've had. I'm pretty fussy about noise - I disconnected the fan on my Thomson DVR because it was far too loud for my taste, for example - and I have no complaints about the Toppy.

Although the Humax has a fan that runs in standby, I reckon it must be attenuated down to about 5V because you can't hear in unless you sit with your ear six inches away. And from that position it's usually difficult to see the TV.

I've had my Toppy since last April. It has a Seagate drive and this drive is getting quite loud, now. I SAID IT'S GETTING QUITE LOUD, NOW.

Would that be just in time for a warranty claim ?

Er, no. When I get my HTPC back on the road, I'm gonna, no, let's not go there.

I have a 250GB Spinpoint that's going in as soon as I can get the recordings off the Seagate drive.