Western Digital WDG1S5000VN 500GB My DVR Expander eSATA

I had held off buying one of these because I felt the price was way too high. It was very easy to install and now I have all the storage I will ever need.

It does just exactly what it says it does. My family was in a constant battle over whose shows got recorded and whose didn't. Basic DVR would record about 10 hour long HD episodes and we were lost. Installed extender. Went from 90% full to <20%. Problem solved, for now anyway.

Like the other 40+ reviewers, this was a breeze to install with my TiVo Series III HD. That was 18 months ago, and it's worked perfectly until today. I ran the Kickstart 54 SMART diagnostics, and the external drive has failed. A ton of stored stuff is gone forever (although I may try the trick of freezing the drive and transferring to my PC). 18 months is way too short for the life of an HD drive.

My plan was to eventually get this expander all along. I have always been a fan of Tivo, and when the right deal came my way I got the new Dual tuner HD Tivo that only recorded 20 hrs in HD. Tivo at the time was selling a larger Tivo with I believe 40 hrs recording in HD for $400-$500. 20 Hours is definitely not enough in my house, and if you are considering this, it's probably not enough in your house either.

At the moment they are selling a beast with 150 hrs in HD recording for $600!

Bottom line is that this expander worked perfectly right away. Setup to the device is as easy as plugging it in. Then setting up the Tivo to work with it was quite simple as well. Now I can record 86 hours in HD which for us is way more than enough. We went on a 2 week vacation and still had room to spare when we got back.

In my opinion it is much more economical to buy the standard 20hour HD Tivo and just get this expander to go with it. 86 full HD hours is huge and in just standard digital I think it's in the 500+ hour range. But if you are like me, if it's not in HD now, I don't watch it.

Definitely worth buying.

Bought my 500GB expander in October 2007. Worked great with Cox Cable's Scientific Atlanta 8300HD box for about a year. Then I started noticing tiling in some channels (on live TV, not recorded DVR programs). It got progressively worse. Three techs came out and gave me two new SA cable boxes. Turns out the problem was not the Scientific Atlanta box but rather the Western Digital expander, which was corrupting the live TV signal, even when it wasn't recording anything and I wasn't using the DVR.