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Message: <blockquote data-quote="elconejito" data-source="post: 801060" data-attributes="member: 12592">To give you a **very broad oversimplified** rule of thumb I use... The PVR150 is writing SD streams to the disk probably at a rate of around 10mb/s. The Colossus is writing HD streams to disk probably around 20mb/s. Both of those rates are complete estimates by me (don't recall where I got them from), and are dependent on the quality setting you choose. So if you are recording 2 streams at once, thats about 30mb/s being written to the disk. If you are also watching one of those streams, lets say HD stream, then you are also reading another 20mb/s off of the disk resulting in a total of about 50mb/s. If you are using only one drive, so this is also your windows install then you can add, at any particular moment, you A/V software decides to do a scan, windows decides it wants to update NOW, a random program checks for an update online, if you approach the 2GB ram limit (very possible if using vista or win7) then you can also add swap file usage there as well. (I'm not sure how timeshifting plays a part if your watching a show you are recording....). Most recent (say last 5 years or so) hard drives have a max speed of approx 80mb/s. The newer Western Digital Caviar Blacks are over 100mb/s, the WD 1TB Black i use for my recordings has a max of just under 120mb/s if i recall correctly. Most recent drives keep most of that speed up until about 20-30% full where you start to see a slight performance dip. Then as you approach and pass 50% you see a BIG performance dip, sometimes dropping as much as half their speed or more as you approach being full. What also influences the speed is how fragmented your drive is, and how spread out across the drive your data is.So I wrote all that so say.... If your drive is in decent shape (not too fragmented, and not a bunch of superflous garbage on it), and of a decent size/not too full, and reasonably "new-ish", you should be OK. You can control the fragmentation to a point, you can control the amount of data you keep on it to a point, and you can control to a point the bitrate of the recording streams.If you have a really old drive, or its full (doesn't matter then if its new or not), then you *may* need a new drive. But definitely try it out first before you go adding drives you may or may not need. And if you do decide to upgrade your drives, I'd highly recommend multiple drives if you have the room in your case, rather than one big expensive drive that does everything. So that way you can keep your old "crappy" drive as OS/boot/programs/scratch/timeshift and the new drive for recordings. HTH</blockquote>

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