There's a high end HD TiVo (Series 3) with a 250GB drive instead of the 160GB. It also has other features like surround sound. And it costs double the price of the standard HD ($600 vs. $300).

There's a 500GB, power saving, quiet running Hard drive for $70 at Newegg.com. It requires a little bit of semi-advanced computer gymnastics to get it recognized by the TiVo, but it's a much better option unless you REALLY want surround sound from your TiVo.

:D Noted and smilied.

20 hours is so not enough recording time

Here is the site that convinced me that I did not want to do my own eSATA DVR expansion. You would probably be better capable to do a lot of this than I. But for me, a part of it was the TiVo support issue.

Support shmaport. And the expansion I'm looking at is internal. None of this namby pamby external stuff.

Sadly, all the expansion I'm looking at is external. Wait, what?

I don't know if it is relevant (I'm perfectly happy with the crappy 20-hour DVR I now have) but Andrew Rich recently did a big expansion of his DVR to allow him to record pretty much all of the Olympics (all I remember of the details is mentions of terabytes).

He detailed it here.

We've spent the last 4 or 5 year using ReplayTV and TiVo. Between those two it's a tossup (I love them both), but for anyone who is used to the functionality and responsiveness of either of those, the Scientific Atlanta Explorer that Time Warner provides is like something from the stone ages. Even discounting the flat-out bugs (like the audio dropping out every so often, requiring either changing channels or power cycle to restore) it's abismal. From painfully slow response time to arcane menu structure to seriously sub-par search and subscription options.

It's definitely a case of "yuppie angst" as my dad would call it, but having been spoiled for so many years by the best in the business, it would pain me to pay for something so decidedly inferior.

I have Time Warner here, and I suppose I will be complaining too when I eventually get HD. Right now I just bitch about how there's no way to get what you record from the DVR to other digital storage. I lost a bunch of stuff when I moved and turned in my old one. I even tried the record to VHS last-ditch option and it didn't work.

In France, I paid slightly over 30 Euro a month for internet, cable and phone, including free long distance to the US and New Zealand. They also have the option of a la carte channel selection, which I so wish we had here. Oh, and the cable box had a hard drive that allowed you to upload the recording to a PC if you wanted.

FWIW, we have TW as our HD service provider and on that alone I have no complaints.

Actually, I have a complaint against one of the two satellite companies: on the Thursday before the middle weekend of the Olympics, one of our neighbors had satellite installed (we live in a condo). Their installer started randomly unplugging lines until he found the one he needed. TW service technician had to some out to discover that (the boxes are locked - I can't access them).

Fvcking bastards.

So we tried to call and schedule them to come out and install the cable cards. But they had no weekend slots available and their only weekday openings are during business hours. CP gets every other Friday off and they don't have a time available for next Friday, which means we get to wait until 3 weeks from now! We're earch taking off nearly two weeks of vacation time in the next month already, so we can't do it any other time.

And they won't even let me do it myself if I wanted to.