Man down. Dammit. :(

[klwillis45]

:mad: My 1st 8300HD died today. Of course this had to happen when it was over 70 precent full, including the Lost premiere. :bang:

I swung by Mayfair & got a 8300HDC. If only replacing my recordings was so easy.

[ArgMeMatey]

If only replacing my recordings was so easy.

I see this being more of an issue as DVRs become prevalent.  A friend of mine had a similar problem a couple of weeks ago.  

Will they not swap out your hard drive for you?  Can you do it yourself?

[Jack 1000]

:mad: My 1st 8300HD died today. Of course this had to happen when it was over 70 precent full, including the Lost premiere. :bang:

I swung by Mayfair & got a 8300HDC. If only replacing my recordings was so easy.

That sucks. Mine fortunately is about 2 1/2  years old and still works well.  Damn!  There are ten year old Pioneer boxes that are still out in the field!

Any differences between your 8300 HD and your 8300HDC?

Jack

[LoadStar]

Will they not swap out your hard drive for you?  Can you do it yourself?

No, and DEFINITELY no.

[ArgMeMatey]

No, and DEFINITELY no.

Well I've never seen one, but I am guessing they are sealed, right?  So if they don't want you opening the thing, that's understandable, but why can't they give you the option to get your stuff?  

If you had a leased computer with a bad CPU or power supply, and a good hard drive, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect to get your data off the old computer moved to the new one.

[LoadStar]

Well I've never seen one, but I am guessing they are sealed, right?  So if they don't want you opening the thing, that's understandable, but why can't they give you the option to get your stuff?  

If you had a leased computer with a bad CPU or power supply, and a good hard drive, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect to get your data off the old computer moved to the new one.

To the first: yes, the units are sealed shut with a tamper-evident tape. You try and open it, they can charge you, big time. As for the second, it's not your stuff. It's the cable company's box and the networks' programming. You're just temporarily borrowing both.

Besides, I wouldn't expect that a cable company office has people trained in doing hard drive swaps and with the time to do them, no matter how easy it might seem.

[klwillis45]

LoadStar is right on.

Plus, even though I could still swap drives on my own there are 2 other issues.

1)The drive may be tied to that specific unit .

2)Even if it isn't unit specific, you'd still need to swap into the same model DVR, which they don't have anymore.

It's annoying but not surprising that the power supply died after nearly 5 years in service.

[ArgMeMatey]

LoadStar is right on.

Sheesh.  I am doing a lousy job of making my point, which is that it would be nice if the service provider could do a little more to help the customer.  As I've said many times before, we put a man on the moon 40 years ago.  

Most of what I hear about "why" sounds more like (a)"No one has raised much of a stink about it yet." (b) "None of our competitors are doing it, so why should we?"

Long ago, when I asked US Cellular about backing up the hundreds of numbers stored in my phone, I was told they could move the numbers to a new phone, but that was it.  Then a few years ago US Cellular started offering to back up your phone's directory for a fee.  Now I think it's free, no doubt to get a little bit of a competitive edge.  

I realize rights, ownership and liability are all factors, but I'll bet after enough people in service providers' management ranks lose their stuff, there will be a new "product".   (Of course I am assuming those managers watch TV in the first place.)

[mhz40]

Its an issue with digital rights management.  The content is tied directly to the hardware.  If Cablevision ever gets their networked DVR product off the ground, other providers may follow.  Then your recorded content will be hardened via some central storage system, not a single point of failure such as the current stand-alone drive.

[Olias]

If only replacing my recordings was so easy.

This is one of the reasons why I use SageTV. It did take awhile to set up and the final cost was much more than a DVR. But the end result was worth it (for me).

1. DRM free recordings.
2. One centralized "server" that can hold as many recordings as I care to buy disk space for.
3. Whole house viewing (start watching a recording in one room, go to another and pick up where I left off).
4. All of my DVDs, music CDs and family pictures are accessible from the same interface.

This approach is definately not for everyone, but has worked well for our household.

[Stanley Kritzik]

There are hundreds of millions of devices -- probably billions -- with hard drives in them.  No mirroring, no backups, just single drives that have lots of moving parts, assembled by 14-year old girls in Singapore.  If the average lifetime (MTBF) for a hard drive is six, even eight years, there are hard drive failures every day.  (Solid state circuits are at least 10X as reliable, so circuit failures are not an issue.)

So, the weak spot for DVR and/or PC owners is the potential for hard drive failure, and the weak operating systems on DVRs and PCs do not give "predictive failure" notice.

That's never going to change until the solid state hard drive gets competitively cheap enough to replace the rotating disks.  Asking the average consumer to "back up" his hard drive is a waste of time, 'cause it won't happen.  Either that, or automatic "cloud computing" backups will take over -- in the wee small hours.

Stan