Seagate DB35 - Drives Built for your DVR, PVR and Consumer Electronics Devices

When searching for a new or additional hard drive for your TiVo (or other digital video recorder), it is critical to understand that the quality and type of drive used matters tremendously. DVR manufacturers such as TiVo, DIRECTV and others spend countless hours and resources "qualifying" hard drives to ensure that they choose drives that will provide optimal performance.

Almost since its inception, WeaKnees has been using high-end drives made specifically for DVRs. Initially, we used the Maxtor QuickView hard drives are drives specifically manufactured for the PVR market. In mid-2006, Seagate purchased Maxtor and with it, Maxtor's QuickView line. In addition, Seagate has developed its own line of DVR-specific hard drives, the DB35 line, which has been qualified in many TiVo and other DVRs.

Seagate's DB35 drives, and Maxtor's QuickView drives have never been available in retail stores, and can only be purchased through authorized resellers, such as WeaKnees.com.

Seagate DB35 drives and Maxtor QuickView drives have a few key differences from normal desktop drives that make them far superior to desktop drives for PVR usage:

• Thermal Control: On board sensors monitor temperature and adjust characteristics as necessary to keep the temperature optimal.
• Durability: These drives run at 7200 RPM - more than fast enough for every PVR (providing about three times the necessary peak throughput) but not fast enough to wear out sooner.
• Acoustic Management: DVR-specific drives are specially tuned to run as quietly as possible.
• A/V Streaming: DVR-specific drives have been optimized and tuned to provide consistent data to the PVR processor. Standard desktop drives can hang while retrying drive reads - QuickView drives know to move ahead and provide more data to keep video smooth.
• Error Recovery: Desktop drives retry on errors to make sure that your Excel spreadsheet is exactly right - it's imperative. But when watching video, if one block of data is bad, you may not even notice a dark spot on one frame for 1/30th of a second. So these drives are tuned to move past errors faster, putting the stream of data as top priority. Where desktop drives often cause stutters, these drives run smooth.