During the Euro 2004 tournament, our DirecTiVo started having a lot of video and audio stutter problems. By last week, the shows we were recording had become almost impossible to watch. Sometimes the video would freeze for minutes at a time. The on-screen guide was also slowing to a crawl. Bringing up the screen to see what had been recorded sometimes took over thirty seconds.
This is the same Hughes HDVR2 that I upgraded two months ago with a 160 GB drive add-on kit from weaKnees. Fortunately, it’s still under warranty. They requested that we send back both drives, since once you add a second drive, the first one can’t operate without the second one there. That seems a little puzzling to me, but maybe the TiVo software or TiVo’s Linux distribution starts striping new recordings across both drives after it detects the presence of a second drive.
Hopefully, the problem is with the new drive. Otherwise, we have to pay $79 for weaKnees to deal with the original problem, plus presumably more to replace the old bad drive with a new one.