[Photo 1. Digihome DTR80 80GB Freeview Plus TV Recorder]
The recorder has worked OK in its vertical position, next to the TV but note that using it this way invalidates its warrantee.
Having read the reviews here and, as a result, rejecting several DVRs as too noisy or unreliable, in January 2009 I bought a Digihome DTR80 80GB Freeview Plus TV Recorder (special offer from aria.co.uk at £39.95) with the intention of increasing the size of the hard drive. I have found it to be a good choice, quiet (it has no fan) and simple to use. It locks up occasionally, sometimes after bad interference from poorly suppressed car ignition systems and can become slow to use from the remote but copes well with my poor TV signal. It is easy to fill up the hard drive.
500GB. I bought a 500GB Western Digital Caviar - 16MB - IDE – 7200, in June, but soon discovered that this was unsuitable. I had tried the following:
[Photo 2. Interior view without the hard drive heat sinks. Note the lack of noisy fans]
Cloning (note 1) the original 80GB drive and increasing the data partition size (note 2) to almost 500GB. Not recognised by the Digihome.
Cloning (note 1) the original 80GB drive.
Removing all partitions and allowing the Digihome to partition the drive. This resulted in a 384GB data partition (if I remember correctly) and the Digihome worked but play back was slow and jerky. Whenever I powered off and on again, the Digihome saw the drive as a new drive and insisted on reformating it with the same lack of performance.
Drive rejected by me.
80GB. I then tried replacing the drive with an old Maxtor Diamond Max 80GB hard drive and cloned the original drive. This worked perfectly.
250GB. As my intention was to increase the size of the drive, I then tried a 250GB Hitachi P7K500 IDE 7200 Hard Drive. I tried the following:
Cloning the original (note 1). This worked fine.
Cloning the original and resizing the data partition to almost 250GB. This worked OK but the Digihome only registered that it had an 80GB data partition not a 250GB partition.
Reformatted the Drive using the Digihome reformat. Although I lost the data, the Digihome now saw the drive as a 250GB and this has worked well ever since just requiring the occasional reboot when it locks up. I have never used even half of the data partition.
The 250GB drive is noisier than the original, but not excessively so. Despite manufacturer's warnings not to do so, it has worked fine using the Digihome vertically, but with plenty of ventilation around it. As the power consumption is so low (20 watts?) I don't anticipate a problem with heat build up shortening the life of the drive. Digihome mount the drive with large heat sinks to prolong its life.
Although you can only record one programme whilst watching another, because the Digihome has only two tuners, you can record two programmes and watch a third that has already been recorded on the hard drive.
[Photo
3. Close up view of the main circuit board. I had been hoping that the
memory could be increased, to improve performance (speeding up commands
from the remote control, but there is no DIMM slot.]
Notes:
Using Clonezilla from linuxtracker.org
There are two partitions on the drive. A small partition that appears to contain recording information, and a large data partition.