Hi,

I'm thinking of buying the TF5800.

However, I have a few questions as follows:

How is the hardrive cleaned up/defraged?

Is the hardrive upgradable?

Is the hardrive AV quality or is just a PC type?

I know it has 2 'freeview' tuners to record from, but can I feed my FTA motorised satellite receiver to it?

Regards
Alien1x

Clean/ defrag: only by reformatting - you'd lose your recordings
Upgradeable: yes but may have warranty issue (it's dead simple to do)
HDD: PC HDD but we tend to use Samsung V120CE (160GB, 200GB or 250GB)
Sat: no. No external recording on ANY Freeview HDD PVR.

If you wanted to record sat and Freeview on one PVR then the only one springs to mind is the Dreambox DM 7025 with one DVB-S tuner and one DVB-T tuner.

You'd get a Freeview EPG but you would only get now and next on the DVB-S tuner, and you'd get no MHEG (red button) frillies. You'd be able to record 301-303 interractive but you just wouldn't be able to use the MHEG interface.

Edit: You could get a ReelBox instead of the Dreambox. It's more versatile even than a Dreambox, but I learned to drive in a mini. Long time ago now, mind.

"How is the hardrive cleaned up/defraged?"

Generally its not defragged as the fragmentation is not great. Cleaning up is handled by the unit if it detects a problem, e.g. not being shut down if the power is removed.

"Is the hardrive upgradable?"

Yes, this will however invalidate the warrenty. The largest drive so far is 1TB using an external raid box with an IDE > SATA adaptor.

"Is the hardrive AV quality or is just a PC type?"

Its a PC hard drive but is not exactly fast compaired to a PC's. The unit is also mecahnically quiet (but not silent) and has a slower spin speed.

"I know it has 2 'freeview' tuners to record from, but can I feed my FTA motorised satellite receiver to it?"

NO. The unit only records the digital data stream that is retrieved via a normal terestrial broadcast. It cannot record analog signals from the air or via scart leads.

Hope that answers your questions.

So,
Are there any freeview PVR'S with AV quality drives?
Ask as I have heard they perform better.

Regards
Alien1x

No. You have been misinformed. The Samsung V120 CE drives are 5400 rpm with a 2MB cache that you'd not use to put inot a PC nowadays as it'd be too slow. But for CE (consumer electronics) equipment it is just tickety boo and very near silent too.

In fact it is designed for CE equipment but it would fit in a PC so the answer to your question remains, no.

A while ago most drive makers made AV drives that performed all drive maintenance when there was no operations being performed on the disc. This is now standard across all drives and the larger buffers present on modern drives (old drives upto 1MB, modern drives 2MB upto 16MB) allows for some storing of the data before itis written to the drive so that a small delay is now acceptable. They also had sound reduction settings that allowed the stepping of the heads to be slowed down, this again is now standard across all drives.

The drives fitted to most PVR equipment are still massivly overpowered for the needs of the PVR. The drives themselves are easily capable of 30MB/s and all the PVR needs is at most 12Mb/s and thats recording 2 full bandwidth channels and playing back 1 channel from the drive and using the built in USB connection on the toppy. A modern PC drive is capable of even more speed than that so it makes no difference.

In short, an AV drive will make no difference to how the unit operates.