said by Gutch :My 8300 has been cycling all morning and it's driving me nuts. Does anyone know how long this will last? The HD spins up (quite noisily), runs for 20-45 seconds and then spins back down. This seems to happen about every five to eight minutes all morning so far.
In November 2010 Rogers pushed out a firmware update for the SA8300HD PVR that caused the internal hard drive to spin up and shut down every few minutes when the unit was powered off. Any hardware Engineer (I talked to Western Digital at the time) will tell you that this cycling of the drive while reduce its life expectancy. It took Rogers 2 or 3 months to admit they had a problem and 6 months (May 2011) until they updated the firmware to fix the HSUB (Hard drive Spinning Up and Down) issue. Their fix was to keep the drive running 100% of the time even when the PVR was powered off. This technique is also used by other manufacturers such as Motorola.
Last week (September 2012) Rogers pushed out another new firmware reintroducing the HSUD problem again. Anyone with a purchased 8300HD should be aware that this is going to cause your PVRs hard drive to fail requiring a replacement and if its a rental you are going to loss everything that you have recorded.
If you have a 8300HD and are experiencing the HSUD issue I advise you to please call Rogers and report the problem. They will not fix the issue until they get a number of complaints. I hope it doesn't take 6 months this time!
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