We understand, you're not ready to let go of the
BSG season finale just yet even though Tiger and Phil are charging up the back nine at Augusta, but keeping a lot of HD on the DVR can fill up space quickly -- which is where these two come in. Amazon is now taking pre-orders of the long-awaited 1TB edition of Western Digital's TiVo compatible (or other
eSATA enabled box)
DVR Expander, although no ship date is listed, and
Apricorn took our advice on its
fugly 500GB, 1TB or 1.5TB sized boxes, giving them a sleek new look. It's dual USB 2.0 / eSATA compatible, but not TiVo, so Scientific Atlanta 8300, DirecTV and DISH ViP owners can claim this one at $219 for the 1.5TB, while the WD will set you back $183.
Read - Apricorn Unveils New Look for the DVR Expander
Read - Western Digital WDG1S10000N My DVR Expander 1TB eSATA (Black)
DVRs, 
posted Apr 12th 2009 10:49PM
This is good news for Tivo owners. I've had external hard drive features with Dish Network for 2 years now and have 4 500gb drives full of hd movies and specials. It's an awesome feature.
Only bad thing is that swapping the HDD means losing everything recorded on that original drive which is very unfortunate.
You can copy your data over using a computer with free software on a tivo hdd.
I used WinMFS along with a little elbow grease, and have a 1 TB internal and a 1 TB external drive on my TivoHD. Works like a charm. I had to void the remainder of my warranty to perform the swap, but now I have my original drive backed up (in case of disk crash) and tons of space.
If only my Comcast Motorola Cable box had a working eSATA port so I could plug one of these into it!!!
J&R Music is showing the WDG1S10000N as in stock and with a lower sticker price than Amazon.
I was wondering when they would increase the size I have the 500 gb hooked up to my tivo hd it works great. If the 500 gb adds about 60 hours of hd storage then this 1 tb drive should be able to add about 120 hours of hd content the description on amazons product page is wrong.
When I added the 500GB to my TiVo HD it went from 20 hrs to 93 hrs of recording capacity. So I thing it should be even more than 120.
I prefer Dish Network's approach. Instead of replacing your internal drive with the external (and therefore losing all recordings on the internal drive), the Dish receivers use the external drive as an archive. You can use multiple drives if you want to. And it doesn't require a special drive, almost any external USB hard drive will work. I've been using a 1TB drive with my VIP 722 for months, and have about 200 High-Def movies archived for my HD projector.
First on a Tivo, the external doesn't replace the internal and when you add the expander you don't lose anything. It is only if you remove the expander do you lose anything. That said, there are merits an cons to the way the Dish ones work. I would still never go with Dish (no matter how good it is), as they are a dishonest company. (We have too many of those right now in this country, two that I have experience with are Chase Bank and Ford.)
Is there any way to save what is on an old expander if upgrading? Can everything not copy protected be copied over using Tivo Desktop and then copied back when the new drive is place? If doing that, will it recode the HD stuff?
More space, need more space.
Well, for the DirecTv DVRs, this isn't actually an expansion, it replaces your current HD. So, you would theoretically lose all of your recordings (until you switch back to the default HD). Last time I checked, there was no way to move those recordings off or utilize multiple HDs. Dish enabled expansion for (I believe) a $20 one-time fee. I wish DirecTv would wake up on that one.