An interesting admission! Having previously been gainfully employed by the BBC and Channel 4 the expression "It's only television!" is one I'm familiar with. Now everything's working again I'm looking forward to the second half of last year's Crucible snooker and various TPTV series I'd gotten behind with. I'll try not to record quite so much this year, I think.
I should add I run two HDR Fox T2s at my house and set everything to record on both boxes. One uses AR and the other padding, this gives me redundancy of which recording method works for that programme. I mostly watch HD channels so being major channels AR usually works. But this setup also gives me redundancy against a disc failure.
Perhaps not. I was guided by MS Copilot's advice and bought two Seagate Skyhawk ST1000VX013 from Amazon. Our cloned, patched and otherwise fixed HDD has been in service for two weeks now without issue.
Why Surveillance Drives?
Recommended Models (UK Availability)Drive | Capacity | RPM | Cache | Workload Rating | Price (UK) | Notes |
| WD Purple WD10PURZ | 1TB | 5400 | 64MB | 180 TB/yr | ~£68.63 (Amazon UK) | Excellent entry‑level replacement, quiet and reliable. |
| WD Purple WD20PURZ | 2TB | 5400 | 64MB | 180 TB/yr | ~£90–£100 | Popular upgrade size; Humax supports up to 2TB. |
| Seagate Skyhawk ST1000VX005 | 1TB | 5900 | 64MB | 180 TB/yr | ~£65–£75 | Designed for DVR/NVR systems, similar to WD Purple. |
| Seagate Skyhawk ST2000VX015 | 2TB | 5900 | 64MB | 180 TB/yr | ~£95–£110 | Slightly faster spindle speed, good for multi‑stream recording. |
Others are really in a better position to comment on this but - in case it's helpful - here's my experience of running fixdisk on my failing original HDD whose LBA 0 was irrecoverable:
but there is a well known issue with winXP and SSDs, which tend to die after about a year of 24/7 operation, with "cannot find NTLDR" and where does NTLDR reside? At the start of the disk. AFAIK winXP does write to the start of the disk at 1Hz or so. And I wonder if the Humax does the same, due to some other running process? That is why a normal HD (not SSD) is better for these systems.
It hasn't. Just leave it.
Turning it off/on just means you have to start again from the beginning. I guess you can work out how that's not going to make it finish any faster.
The firmware is the same as original (with just a few tweaks. It's the additional software which makes the difference (the firmware tweaks enable the software to launch, plus exposing a few hooks into the hardware operation).
That's the distinction (or hair that is being split) here between Custom Firmware (in flash) and the packages added to it. Even some of the packages live in flash, see the fix-flash-packages diagnostic. Also the linux kernel (in flash) has been built from updated source code, which is how it supports GPT hard discs and much larger sizes than Humax supported. The one thing that isn't rebuilt is the humaxtv application which runs the UI, records and plays back things etc.
Actually for the linux kernel we do have the source, Humax were required to publish it due to open source licencing. It wasn't quite right they missed out a couple of security fixes, but af123 the author of much of this stuff figured it out and added that back in plus some other kernel security fixes.
It's a MIPS processor. I don't know other details except yes there are two tuners.
I would have thought that with tools like Ghidra around these days that wouldn't be a big obstacle. It is reputed to be able to generate pretty good high level language source code by examining the program structure, although I haven't tried.