A neat trick for hackers

[lrhorer]

I spotted this neat little trick over on the mfslive.ord forum, and the more I think about it, the more I like it. It's great for those of us who will regularly maintain hacks on our Series III TiVo or TiVo HD.

Here's the trick: Swap the little SATA cables inside the TiVo and move the internal drive to an e-SATA enclosure like the Antec MX-1. If you have an external drive, move it to the inside of the TiVo.

Discussion: For me at least, removing the hard drive from my TiVo is always a hassle, especially since I have some minor disabilities which make pulling all the cables and opening up both the TiVo and one of my PCs a little bit difficult and even painful. If the main drive is in the external enclosure, however, I don't have to open anything or remove power from any of my PC drives or anything else. All I have to do is move the eSATA enclosure over about a foot and plug it in to the back of a PC rather than the TiVo, boot up my favorite flavor of TiVo Linux CD, and go to town. The MX-1 even comes with an eSATA bracket for the PC.

[ciper]

Seems like a neat idea. I have one question though, if you move a single drive to the outside will you need to install a large resister on the 12 volt line in order to place load on the power supply? I know with computer power supplies they may not work properly (or be damaged) by have too little of a load.

[captain_video]

That shouldn't be a problem. Most external enclosures have their own power supplies so there's no need to mess with adding an additional resistor.

[ciper]

I think we've misunderstood each other.

My point was that removing the internal hard drive completely was too little of a load on the internal power supply. I have let the magic smoke out of a couple power supplies because of this!

edit: Please view this page http://lib.daemon.am/Books/Upgrading_PC/ch08/ch08.htm#Heading7 . Specifically look for the term "sandbar" to see what I mean.

[captain_video]

Gotcha.;) .

[philhu]

I did this.

The power supply thing is important.

What I did was put an old 40g sata drive on the internal power supply, NOT connected in any way to the tivo, except by power

That makes it kill a few extra watts