When HDMI cables come into Aldidl I usually grab one or two, as I'm fairly assured of half-decent quality without mail-order hassle if they're not. So far I haven't had one fail, and nearly all the other cheapies have been ok too, but I avoid the 99p ones just in case. There's been one cheapy that seemed to cause a problem but it was fine in another link set-up, so meh.
Kodak seems to be just a badge put on a lot of bought in rubbish. Unfortunately people remember a 'brand' from the past (in some cases from the recent past) and associate the products as being quality. Often the brand name has been sold on or the business model has changed.
In the consumer market I associate Kodak with film that no-one now uses so its no wonder that to make money the name appears on other products now. The products for which the brand awareness was associated no longer are in fashion.
From the pics, looks like the "upgrade" consists of sticking beefier caps on the voltage regulator outputs by desoldering the existing surface-mount ones and bodging on axial-lead electros. A bargain for
Useful to know. Having rejected those costing £20 or more in Maplins, Currys etc, I opted for one costing about £2 from some ebay seller, which worked fine. Then I discovered Poundland and was annoyed that I'd failed to survey the market properly.
Incidentally, I don't know if they do HDMI cables, but my experience is that the 99p store chain has goods which are even better value for money. One or two things I've got from Poundland have been so shoddy that I've had to take them back for a refund.
According to a friend who has investigated this, they missed replacing caps on the audio output, used an IEC mains socket earthed to the case (originally a double insulated item, so now original makers safety & EMC certification non-compliant unless RA retested), bodged a mains filter held with hot melt glue, used short service life 85degC caps near hot parts. Another modification involved an added regulator and a 555 timer
- heaven knows what for. Watchdog reset?
To balance, there are other companies that offer a similar service but at least their customers aren't treated like fools and not told the technical justification for the upgrades - just pseudo science and the price.
Humax were approached for comment, I can't share that here - but you can guess....
If you are using hdmi output none of what they do matters with the possible reduction in noise from the disk. You can make that silent with an ssd if you want (but not advisable as they record continuously and would wear out rather quick).
I had read that the early SSDs could be fragile with constant writes, but I thought they were now much better, and way beyond electro-mechanical disks in terms of reliability.
If cost wasn't too much of a problem I'd have thought an SSD would be ideal in a PVR.
They wear out. They have a lifetime write limit, usually in the few tens of terrabytes. Once you get that high the wear levelling has done all it can and the chances of failure start to increase rapidly.
Here's a "to-the-death" test of a (non-representative) sample of various SSDs being constantly written to
Meanwhile for spinning rust, this company (who sell online backup as a service) publish their failure rates across tens of thousands of drives from various manufacturers
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