Beef Up Your DVR With an Extra Hard Drive

You live and die by your DVR. Without it, you’d never watch your favorite shows. After all, in this day and age, who conforms to the schedules of when something airs rather than just sitting down and watching it when you want? That’s so last century. But when you go a while without catching up on your shows and clearing off your hard drive, trouble strikes. You’ve got to delete something you haven’t watched or skip recording something new, neither of which are great options.

The solution? Beef up that DVR hard drive! The
Iomega 500GB DVR Expander Drive eSATA is an external hard drive designed to plug into your DVR, giving it a whopping 500GB of extra space. In TV terms, that’s 300 hours of standard definition TV or 60 hours of high def TV, which should be plenty for even the stingiest of show hoarders out there. Never delete a show you haven’t watched again!

Look for it soon!

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This entry was posted by Adam on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 2:42 pm

Viewing 6 Comments

Felix 09/11/2008 07:47 PM 1 point
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Small correction - you don't get extra 500GB of space. You get 500GB instead of what you have internally (usually 250GB). Because you can't use both drives simultaneously - only one or another.

Don't get me wrong - it's not bad, but it's not a whopping 500GB of extra space.

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http://www.rabinovich.org

Wayne 09/11/2008 07:56 PM 1 point
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He's right. Why not a 1TB for about the same price with double the storage?

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Bruce McIntyre 09/11/2008 08:13 PM 1 point
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And in either case, it will only work if your provider makes use of the eSATA port on the DVR. I have Comcast here, and when I ask Tech Support about both the eSATA connection and the RJ45 Ethernet connection I get a blank stare... They rustle round their documentation and finally tell me the software they use doesn't support either.

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Mark 09/11/2008 08:20 PM 1 point
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Since when was 60 hours of HDTV "plenty for even the stingiest of show hoarders?" That's a silly, frivolous statement if I ever heard one. That's a scant 2.5 days, compared to over 2.5 years of iTune podcasts I've already downloaded. It's a drop in the bucket. A drive of this type should begin with at least a terabyte of storage if it's going to keep halfway up with new TV standards. I hope the clunker isn't priced over 60 bucks. I've already seen Seagate 1 TB drives, with eSATA, selling for under 200 bucks on Amazon.

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Jim 09/11/2008 10:17 PM 1 point
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My TiVo HD will use the internal drive and external together, so this would add 60 hours or so to the existing 20hrs of HD capability I currently have. The TiVo spreads the shows across both drives, so if you want to remove the external one you had better be prepared to lose everything you have recorded! Otherwise you have to watch everything first, then remove the external drive and you are back to the single internal one. Plus, the machine must be turned off to connect or disconnect it!

I think I will wait for a bigger one at a lower price!

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Bryan P 09/13/2008 08:32 AM 1 point
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Felix, Like Jim says- it depends on your DVR. Mine will use an internal and external together. You need to talk to your provider first as some boxes do not have an eSATA port enabled. Some providers (like mine) will also charge a fee to have the external drive connected- not physically, but just to enable it to function.

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