How’s your DVR space?

An interesting blog post by Gizmodo’s Wilson Rothman hit close to home for me today. Partly because I work for Seagate and focus on the storage market for consumer electronics which is dominated by DVRs, but also because I’m a DVR fan and a fan of Tivo.

Wilson’s blog post happens to focus on Tivo’s lack of interest in testing or supporting Seagate’s Showcase DVR expander. However, it highlights an increasingly irratating issue for many people, me included – runing out of space on your DVR.

I have two teenage daughters and a wife who have long ago figured out the benefits of our DVR. We quickly filled up our 80GB Tivo , and had to take time to “manage our space” now and then. I don’t know about you, but “managing my space” is not what I want to spend time doing. Not to mention the tough choices about what stays and what goes…. I still have bad memories of when my daughters found out I nuked a bunch of episodes of America’s Next Top Model ;-

I’m sort of mystyfied why service providers and DVR makers don’t take more advantage of enabling external storage options. In my case, when my Tivo ran out of space and I started getting tired of “managing my space”, I started shopping for my next DVR, which happened not to be a Tivo!

At the risk of sounding self serving, next time your running low on DVR space, call your service provider and investigate options for storage expansion. You might just maintain a bit more peace in the family!

2009-05-15T15:46:53+00:00

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One Comment

  1. David Fox May 21, 2009 at 8:39 pm - Reply

    Well, I never had a *real* TiVo (how is that capitalized anyway?) but I had a DVR for a while when I subscribed to Dish Network. (I moved, got Direct TV two years ago and they don’t offer a DVR option, at least they didn’t when I signed up, so I never pursued it). But the DVR / sat tuner combo that Dish Network used at that time (2006) had a capacity of at least 200GB. I’m guessing here because of the apparent capacity of the drive: I never actually took a look inside the unit, naturally.

    My brother also has Dish Network and he has the HD DVR and I’d imagine there is much bigger capacity here, simply because of HD recording. However, for some reason, Dish Network charges an unreasonable cost for turning on their USB so you can add in a second drive. Pity.

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