For those of you with a cable or satellite DVR or TiVo, Western Digital has updated their My Book AV DVR Expander hard drives. Among other things, is the addition of a USB port, to the already existing eSATA port. That means the drives are now compatible with the Sony PS3 and other media devices such as camcorders.
This is TiVo’s one and only “official” method of hard drive expansion.
The capacity has not changed – it’s still 1TB, but I think we can expect that to be expanded on in the near future. Although, 1TB is an awful lot of HDTV recording. I never came close to filling the 500GB drive in my DirecTV HR23.
One thing to watch out for, at least for DirecTV users (and I have no idea if this applies to other DVR’s) is that this drive replaces the internal drive. The good news is that it replaces, but doesn’t overwrite. In other words unplug this drive and reboot to the original internal drive and all of your previous recordings are still there. It would be nice if it added to, instead of replacing, but beggars can’t be choosers. And, since most cable DVR’s have ridiculously small drives, this is a no-brainer of an upgrade.
So, what do you pay for this convenience? It retails for $149.99, but Amazon already has it for $119.00. This is what we should have from our TV providers to begin with, but, for now, we have to pay extra for. And this is, by far, the best extra you can add to your DVR.