Expanding TiVo Series3
I got tired of running out of space on my TiVo Series3 DVR especially after recording every episode of “Planet Earth“, so I finally decided to expand the storage space on it.
Rather than buy a shiny new drive, I recycled one of my PC’s old 500GB SATA drives until it started to exhibit some flaky behavior. You might wonder why I would put a potentially defective drive into a DVR. First, a single bad sector in a DVR (especially a HD one) is literally a tiny blip of video. Second, these DVRs are designed to blow right through any bad sectors on the disk: it is basically the digital equivalent of a bad TV signal. Third, I don’t care if I were to lose any TV shows, whereas I do care a great deal if lose any content on my PC.
Conveniently this particular 500GB SATA drive happened to be already housed in a Vantec NexStar 3 NST-360SU-BL USB 2.0/eSATA enclosure. It’s almost as if I had planned it that way! Funny how these things work, eh?
Anyway, even though I do have some prior knowledge of the internals of these units, I followed the widely published instructions on how to do the expansion, just for kicks. No sooner said than done, the process was done and over with: I now have a Series3 DVR with 98hr of HDTV recording space, or a whopping 927 hours of standard definition (SD) recording space.
The only problem is that this particular 500GB drive and its enclosure are nowhere near as well soundproofed as the Series3 unit itself. I’ll have to bury the external drive inside the A/V cabinet.