Author Topic: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.  (Read 6812 times)

Sarita

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New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« on: September 08, 2014, 07:11:16 PM »
http://nypost.com/2014/09/08/new-dvr-can-store-26000-hours-of-tv/

For a low, low price of $5,000.

That's pretty cheap to give away three years of your life.

Elderwood17

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #1 on: September 08, 2014, 07:21:39 PM »
 Somewhere someone is saying "I need that!"

fantabulous

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #2 on: September 08, 2014, 09:49:36 PM »
Somewhere someone is saying "I need that!"

I need that. Much storage. Some day. (For William. Shatner recordings.)

Back of the envelope math gets me about $2500 to build this kind of storage myself with recording capabilities. Still a lot of money.

GuitarStv

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #3 on: September 09, 2014, 06:51:08 AM »
Yeah, my old one held 25,000 hours and it just wasn't enough.


Lemme do some math on this for a sec.  26,000 hours works out . . . . 365 days a year, seven days a week, 12 hours a day of watching TV for just under 6 years.  Seems a bit silly.

Spork

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #4 on: September 09, 2014, 09:08:04 AM »

I know people like this (and we probably all do.)  I see DVRs as time shifters.  They're temporary space to hold something to watch later.  But...  I cannot tell you how many people I know want to store things forever.  Lots of things.  This can range from "I want to keep this particular show" to "I want to create a massive movie library."

It is the digital equivalent of a hoarder.

Personally, I find services like Netflix to be a grand storage mechanism.

eil

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #5 on: September 09, 2014, 10:06:46 AM »
It's a pretty ridiculous device, aimed at those who would pay $500,000 for a car with a 1 billion gallon gas tank.

It stores a crap-load of video, yes, but by the time you actually get anywhere near filling up the disks, enough time will have passed that it is functionally obsolete or (more likely) will be broken.

The claimed capacity is 24 terabytes. The largest size disk you can get in volume these days is 6TB, which means you need four of them. Disks fail, and they fail often, so in order to not have customers at your door with pitchforks, you need to build in a bunch of redundancy, which means doubling the number of disks. So, 8 x 24TB disks at a minimum. At retail prices, that's $2400 in disks in today's dollars.

I was going to try to figure out the electrical requirements, but honestly, I can't be bothered. Rest assured running a box like this 24 hours is going to subtract a noticeable wad of cash from your wallet every month.

Spork

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #6 on: September 09, 2014, 10:23:54 AM »

The claimed capacity is 24 terabytes. The largest size disk you can get in volume these days is 6TB, which means you need four of them. Disks fail, and they fail often, so in order to not have customers at your door with pitchforks, you need to build in a bunch of redundancy, which means doubling the number of disks. So, 8 x 24TB disks at a minimum. At retail prices, that's $2400 in disks in today's dollars.
.

It's actually RAID5 (and hot swappable)... That doesn't mean double the disks... that means you need a parity disk (and possibly a hot spare... not sure if their design has one or not.)

But yeah: it's overkill.

AH013

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #7 on: September 09, 2014, 11:14:12 AM »
I have a 3TB array...$150 all in for the 3 TB harddrive and the DVR....still haven't come close to filled it up in a year of recording ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC....

Quark

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #8 on: September 09, 2014, 12:11:21 PM »
For a bare bones, no backup file storage:

A 1-hour show is ~700MB.

You would need 18.2 TB to store 26,000 hours of tv.

On Newegg I see there are some 4TB internal desktop HDs for $150.

$683


ABC123

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #9 on: September 09, 2014, 01:05:34 PM »
Wow.  That's a lot of tv shows.  I admit, we do have a dvr through dish network.  I would happily give it up, but the hubby has literally never lived without ESPN and won't even discuss it.  It is nice having a few episodes of Thomas and SuperWhy ready to pull up when I need to keep the kiddos out of trouble for a few minutes.  A few months ago, the hard drive on our dvr crashed.  We got a new one, but everything we had recorded was gone forever.  I can't even imagine the mental distress I would be facing if I paid that much for a dvr and then lost it.  A $5k dvr is pretty ridiculous.

NoraLenderbee

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #10 on: September 09, 2014, 01:49:43 PM »
I can't imagine there's 26,000 hours of stuff worth watching. When I first got satellite TV, I kind of gorged on it for a while, but it was hard to fill up even 4 hours a day. Let's see--you could watch every Super Bowl ever televised, every episode of Masterpiece Theatre and Star Trek and Cops, and then . . . what? 

Spork

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #11 on: September 09, 2014, 02:23:38 PM »
FWIW: It's 26k hours of SD programming.  It's only (only!, lol) 4000 hours of HD programming.  It is probably a first bet on ultra HD TV... but I don't see specs on how many hours of that it holds -- or if it even is capable of that.

fantabulous

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #12 on: September 09, 2014, 03:23:22 PM »

The claimed capacity is 24 terabytes. The largest size disk you can get in volume these days is 6TB, which means you need four of them. Disks fail, and they fail often, so in order to not have customers at your door with pitchforks, you need to build in a bunch of redundancy, which means doubling the number of disks. So, 8 x 24TB disks at a minimum. At retail prices, that's $2400 in disks in today's dollars.
.

It's actually RAID5 (and hot swappable)... That doesn't mean double the disks... that means you need a parity disk (and possibly a hot spare... not sure if their design has one or not.)

But yeah: it's overkill.

I had guessed RAID6, since RAID 5 is pretty dangerous with an array that large. I had initially counted 8 bays, so guessed 8x4TB disks (6 data, 2 parity). Looks like it's actually 10 bays, so 10x3TB is an option that might be cheaper. Or 8x4TB and a RAID 1 for firmware/etc.

Spork

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #13 on: September 09, 2014, 03:30:34 PM »

The claimed capacity is 24 terabytes. The largest size disk you can get in volume these days is 6TB, which means you need four of them. Disks fail, and they fail often, so in order to not have customers at your door with pitchforks, you need to build in a bunch of redundancy, which means doubling the number of disks. So, 8 x 24TB disks at a minimum. At retail prices, that's $2400 in disks in today's dollars.
.

It's actually RAID5 (and hot swappable)... That doesn't mean double the disks... that means you need a parity disk (and possibly a hot spare... not sure if their design has one or not.)

But yeah: it's overkill.

I had guessed RAID6, since RAID 5 is pretty dangerous with an array that large. I had initially counted 8 bays, so guessed 8x4TB disks (6 data, 2 parity). Looks like it's actually 10 bays, so 10x3TB is an option that might be cheaper. Or 8x4TB and a RAID 1 for firmware/etc.

I only knew because I'd read the press release.  I've been a longtime Tivo fan and sort of watched them grow up.  I'd wildly bet (guess) the firmware/OS is just a couple of partitions on the bigass drive.  I'm guessing that because that's what they've done in the past.  Usually they have 2 boot partitions.  If one fails, they fallback to the other.  In OS upgrades, they update one so failures will fall back to previous OS.  But that is all wild guessing.

http://investor.tivo.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=106292&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1964575

SisterX

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #14 on: September 09, 2014, 05:35:28 PM »
And here I was feeling rather silly for biting off more than I can chew by ordering 7 ILL books from the library at one time, frantically trying to read them before the due dates.  Thank you for showing me that there are people out there who are much sillier than I am.

slugline

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #15 on: September 10, 2014, 08:47:09 AM »
If I have that much disk space at my command, I'd want the silly thing to at least double as a backup storage for my personal files from my other devices too. Because that's well beyond my need to store TV programming....

strider3700

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #16 on: September 10, 2014, 02:48:08 PM »
I'm a data hoarder.   Other then things lost due to a HD crash a few years back I have pretty much everything I've ever created, downloaded, installed...  going back to 1998.     I can completely understand the mentality of actual hoarders.   I can open up my desktop from the early 2000's and it's like flipping through a photo album remembering the past.     All of it fits in only 10 TB and everything from before 2008 fits in less then 1TB.  luckily HD's keep getting cheaper per gb so In general when I upgrade my PC the number of HD's is staying pretty stable. 

jmusic

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #17 on: September 22, 2014, 11:13:19 AM »
I've got a FreeNAS Server that I built myself using 6x3TB drives, in RAID6 configuration with 12TB net storage, for all of about $1100.  16GB ECC memory, server grade motherboard, etc.  This setup houses my entire movie library (~1900 titles, at least 2000 hours), probably about 2000 hours of TV, and still has plenty of space for backups and anything else I can think of to do with it.     

I built this before becoming ultra-frugal of course, and it cost ~$7/mo to run 24/7.   

If I did a $2500 build, I'd probably have a 10x4TB RAID6 array with 32TB of storage, which is quite a bit more than said TIVO, with greater capabilities to boot. 

mydogismyheart

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #18 on: September 24, 2014, 02:40:26 PM »
Comcast is actually in the process of working on going away from the traditional DVR and moving to cloud storage.  According to the company this will give the ability to offer way more storage space AND You'll be able to watch from anywhere you have internet access vs. just watching on 1 TV.  I dunno how cost effective it is vs. just buying a small storage device that can easily plug into anything, but the convenience will be nice until the cloud service goes down or is hacked into.  LOL.

mydogismyheart

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Re: New DVR holds 26,000 hours of TV programming.
« Reply #19 on: September 24, 2014, 02:42:19 PM »
Comcast is actually in the process of working on going away from the traditional DVR and moving to cloud storage.  According to the company this will give the ability to offer way more storage space AND You'll be able to watch from anywhere you have internet access vs. just watching on 1 TV.  I dunno how cost effective it is vs. just buying a small storage device that can easily plug into anything, but the convenience will be nice until the cloud service goes down or is hacked into.  LOL.

Although on the other hand, if you're like a lot of people now days (and my family is) many people will be able to share the cost of the service and log in and use from anywhere. :)