PVR/DVR musings

Computer Help and Discussions The Lounge
1

I've just treated myself to a new PVR (or DVR according to what's written on the box) to replace my aging tape machine. I'm impressed so far, but HD is at present a waste of time and money.

Anyway, I was pondering, as one does. All the time the box is on it operates in pause/go back/catchup mode, so you can pause a live broadcast and resume later, or ff backwards (fb?)if you've missed a bit. This means that data is constantly being written to the hard disk at around 2 gb an hour. As I usually write about 25 mb a day to my pc, this is an enormous hammering of the disk in the PVR. Say 10 gb a day, 1 tb every 100 days. Or does it use the cache to do this? 320 mb isn't reallly enough. Actually I only use the PVR for recording/playback and the odd foray into HD, so most days it remains in standby, not writing to disk.

Another muse is do you think there's a reason why SSD's havent been used in PVR's (as far as I know)?

A last muse, there's no defrag facility! Ha, I always knew it was an over-rated pastime.

2

I had been curious about the same.

Lack of SSD my guess is cost, although prices seem to be dropping.

As I understand it defragging is done automatically in the background by most if not all PVR. Sky boxes have a menu option called optimise

3

A last muse, there's no defrag facility! Ha, I always knew it was an over-rated pastime.

The PlayStation 3 also doesn't have a defrag tool either, although I've seen people inquiring about it, but it really isn't needed.

If/when my Sony home DVD recorder goes kaput I'll probably buy a DVR myself.