That is the correct model, ST3750640A. I've been watching SUPERNATURAL on WGN-HD, and the pixelation hasn't been nearly as bad as it was on CITY-HD. I've also got a number of recordings scheduled, both HD and SD, so we shall see. More monitoring over the weekend.

Check your signal strength & S/N ratio. Sometimes if people have a marginal signal, a change in drive may put them over the edge:

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=17719

I'll do that when I get home. I watched a couple of SD channels last night, and no issues whatsoever, so that may very well have a lot to do with it.

I seem to be getting a lot of pixelation now that the new drive is up and running. Opinions, anyone?
Check your signal strength to make sure it is within acceptable tolerances.

Buzzinhornets,

Is the new disk in and which method did you use to clone the drive?

I don't have usb drives apart from sticks and am interested to see you can clone the way you originally had it planned which would mean if sucessful it cloned and put the drive as a primary active partition.

Thanks

Well, my Level is -7 dBmV, and S/N is 35 dB. That's all well within acceptable limits from what I've read. I should probably call Rogers to see if there are any issues at their end, right?

Jem, the signal strength and s/n can vary on difference channels. Be sure to check the channels you’re having problems with.

One other thing that might be causing your problem is the drive. From what I remember reading on one of the “external hard drive threads”, is people were having problems with the newer Seagate drives (7200.9, 7200.10 etc). Although lots of people report no problem with standard PC type hard drives, some may be too “smart” for a PVR application. The error checking that the drive is constantly doing may interfere with the smooth storage of high bandwidth video streams. From what I understand the dumber the drive is the better. Drives designed for video storage do very little error checking. Unfortunately these drives (A/V or CE type) although not really more expensive are not as easy to get your hands on.

I did more checking last night, and my level on many of the HD channels is in the -15 to -16 range (the numbers turn orange), so I'm not getting that great a signal. I have a Rogers-installed splitter, but I'm also in a condo, so I'll probably need to get a tech in to trace back to the closet on my floor.
I've also noticed that the hdd takes a few seconds to spin up when I turn the PVR on. Annoying, but I don't think there is anything I can do about it.

I've also noticed that the hdd takes a few seconds to spin up when I turn the PVR on

Trust me people with external HDDs would love to have that feature work reliably.

I've also noticed that the hdd takes a few seconds to spin up when I turn the PVR on. Annoying, but I don't think there is anything I can do about it.
I am really annoyed when mine does not spin down after a period of inactivity. I am in the camp that believes that constant spinning reduced the lifetime of the drive, wastes electricity, and generates excess heat.

Put in a call to Rogers last night, and went through the usual gyrations with a level one tech. Naturally there was no improvement, so she generated a ticket for a 24/48 hour callback from tech support. 29 hours and counting...

What a surprise. No callback.

lonetreejim

Did you check acoustic management setting after you enabled it and rebooted the PC ? I enabled it (didn't hear any difference though, drive is very quiet with AM disabled), rebooted PC and setting is back to disabled, even every time you enable it, it says "sucessfully enabled", but somehow the setting is not being saved after reboot. So, I guess I'm not going to bother with it.
Actually, it does make quite a difference in acoustic level. I did some tests with the Hitachi utility on my computer hard disk a sata AACS from WD. You cannot choose the level, you can but it will default to the lowest on the slider which is 128. The other end of the scale is 254 so it’s either all the way or no way. I tested the burst and sustained speed, my average on 20 tests shows very minor or no change in speed.

Incidentally, if you do run the Hitachi utility, on all occasions it kept the new setting after power down power up, on my computer disk, the pvr and another WD 160gig disk I have in another computer and I tried all 3 multiple times.

Now to the PVR’s AAKB WD pata I had put in a while ago. I was able to hear the disk click when it recorded. I would not call it noisy but I could hear it even while watching another program at normal sound. My previous disk in the pvr was a Seagate which was quite silent.

This time around, I took the cover off the pvr, left everything screwed in, disconnected the power and pata ribbon, opened a computer, took the power and connector off the drive and connected it to the pvr AAKB, booted with the CD and changed the settings to enabled recommended value. You can determine right there and then the change in noise level by running the ALT T for test and changing the slider, as soon as you leave 254, at around 250 you don’t hear it clicking anymore.

I saved the change, closed the 8300HD and in order to test it properly, recorded 2 HD 1 hour shows at the same time. I then reprogrammed in the same time slot 2 more 1 hour HD show while watching the previous recordings and going fast forward, pause 4 times FF etc. After the new recordings were finished, I watched them carefully; it had no skip blip or choke, perfect recordings at playback.

The 500gig was worth the effort and the acoustic management makes it even better.

I swapped the hdd back into the 8300HD, and the pixielation went away, so obviously the hdd was the problem. That's frustrating. What drive(s) are recommended? I see a number of different ones here, but does anyone have experience with more than one, and can make a recommendation?

I have 2 SA8300HDs running without issue for months with WD3200AVJB installed. These are A/V or CE drives and my be available locally now, but I purchased them from Ncix.

JEM

if you read back to about page 7, you will find that most of us switched to WD5000AAKB which is available almost everywhere in Canada. I have been running mine for about 2 months now without any problems. Although, read back to one of my post regarding acoustic level on that drive. It doesn't need to be tweaked but it should before you put it in the pvr. The last few days I have been pounding the hell out of it just to make sure that changing the acoustic level does not cause dropouts which it doesn't.

One thing of interest that was never mentioned by anyone was FAST FORWARD. Don't know about Leadfoot's drive but mine is much faster on the FF than my original drive which was a seagate A/V drive. You will notice it when watching the new 30 seconds advertising just before that start of a program where they count down. If you press FF then, you will notice that after a few seconds on FF, it accelarates. I'm surprised nobody mentioned it.

Am I the only one with the phenomena?????

For the Hitachi utility, see post #96

I believe the "acceleration" that you mention depends on how busy the PVR is. For example, if you hit the FF button 3 times, it often takes a second or two for the video to catch up with the demand. I don't believe it's actually "accelerating", but simply not showing the frames on screen as you change FF speeds, especially if the PVR is recording or in the middle of something else at the time, so the buffer (RAM) is being used.

57,
No, not talking about multiple things at the same time or hitting 3 times. Under normal use, just watching 1 recording, nothing else happening, there is a big difference and accelaration going on. I normally hit FF at the start of the countdown and with the old drive, the speed of the countdown was going down at the same speed from 30 to 0, not so with the AAKB, it accellerates after about 1 to 2 seconds.

Same thing FF over commercials watching a recording. It's something you have to get used to, it was easier to time hitting back the PLAY button on a FF. Now it's much faster, after a while you get used to it but I still overshoot some of the time due to the speed.

57,
I saw your Home theater setup, looks nice.

In discussing the issue of Fast Forward going faster, I notice that your sa8300hd is not the same as mine. Mine looks like the pictures posted on page 8 by Ghost, it's silver. Maybe this has something to do with it.

Ghost or anybody that has switched over to a AAKB, did anybody notice the FF going faster? What about you Leadfoot, is your disk going at it faster too?

You can't really measure the speed unless you are able to see the 30 second countdown right before the start of a program, that is where it is more evident. We have this on Radio-Canada your french counterpart of CBC, from memory, I don't remember CBC having the countdown but they must, it's getting popular now and has been adopted by TVA also.

Now, when I say I get a faster FF, I don't mean to say that if you FF for 2 minutes, you will get a constant accelerating, but, during this 2 minutes it will zip by faster, you will see a difference. When I watched American Idol, you get your cue to press play when you see their main screen coming back, well you have to be more attentive now because you can easily overshoot.

I notice that your sa8300hd is not the same as mine.The photo is of an SA3250HD. If you want to see the time pass, record CP24 for a while since it has a clock on it.