TiVo filling up? DVR expanders provide more room to record
— -- Beijing's Olympics provide a reminder why many of us love our digital video recorders. By automatically recording shows onto a hard drive, we can take in sporting events, movies and other programs when we want, without worrying about time differences or schedules determined by TV honchos.
But as with any other hard-drive-based contraption, DVRs have limited storage. All too often, in arranging to record a program on my TiVo HD DVR, I've received the dreaded "not enough disk space" warning. That means deleting shows I haven't watched yet or, worse, wiping out recordings I want to hang on to for posterity.
TiVo fills up even faster when I record programs in high-definition. HD claims roughly 10 times the amount of space as standard-definition recordings.
The Iomega DVR Expander Drive and Western Digital My DVR Expander drive I've been testing promise to increase your DVR's storage capacity, so you won't have to fret about it for a long time.
The Iomega and Western Digital boxes both cost $200 and have 500 gigabytes of storage, equaling about 300 extra hours of standard-definition or up to 60 hours of high-def programming. By adding the Western Digital drive to my TiVo, I upped its capacity to up to 927 standard-definition or 98 high-def hours. You'd have to watch an awful lot of TV to exhaust that much storage.
The two drives are about the size of a chunky hardcover book; the Western Digital box is a little thicker and shorter than the Iomega.
You may ask: "Why do I need a DVR expander when I've got an unused external PC hard drive? Couldn't I just plug it into the DVR's USB port?"
It's not that simple. The USB ports on TiVo, for instance, cannot be used for external storage. Instead, the DVR expanders connect to a different port, called eSata, which TiVo says is more reliable and robust. (I use the USB on my TiVo for a Wi-Fi adapter.) If you do have an eSata drive, you can probably make it work with TiVo by employing an easily found online hack — except there are no guarantees, and you won't have TiVo's blessing.
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