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October 14, 2004

RAM Upgrade For Series 2 DirecTiVo?

I added a second disk to my Hughes HDVR2, bringing it up to 160 hours of record time. The good news is I don't have to worry about space anymore. The bad news is that many functions got really slow, to the point where I dread using them.

Being a Unix geek, I'm reasonably sure that adding RAM will speed things up, at least somewhat. (Buffer cache is your friend.) However, I can't find anybody that sells RAM upgrades for DirecTiVos.

Is there a commercial outfit that will sell me a RAM upgrade? Or some reasonably straightforward instructions for doing it myself? I don't recall having seen DIMM slots when I installed my drive, and I'm hesitant to go soldering myself....
-- mkb

October 14, 2004 in Hacks, TiVo

Answers

9th Tee is one of the only outfits I know selling TiVo RAM upgrades, but I'm almost positive they're only for Series 1 units.

http://www.9thtee.com/tivomemory.htm

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Oct 14, 2004 9:59:32 AM

Yep, I've emailed them twice in the past and received no response.

Posted by: mkb at Oct 19, 2004 12:38:51 AM

It could be that you need more swap space, the default is 64MB. Assuming that you still have your original hard drive you could do something like the following with mfstools:

backup -ao - /dev/hda | restore -s 127 -pxzi - /dev/hdb /dev/hdd

Keep in mind that it's a Linux version 0 swapspace so the maximum size is just short of 128MB, if you enter 128 or higher as the argument for "-s" then the mkswap will fail and you won't have any swap space at all.

My first try at upgrading had the "-s" set to 128 and the "-r" set to 3. Slow as molasses because of no swap at all, the -r set the chunks of video to 8MB so there was more of a delay playing the leftover video of the current chunk whenever leaving video mode. I've decided to just leave "-r" and "-v" alone.

With the "-a" option in the backup, everything gets transferred including all your shows not just your settings.

I haven't been able to get the '-v xxx' for increasing the /var partition to work but I guess that doesn't matter since I can't even see the series 2 partitions with pdisk or fdisk.

Posted by: John at Nov 4, 2004 3:20:42 PM

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