Western Digital My Book AV DVR Expander 1 TB USB 2.0/eSATA External Hard Drive
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- High-capacity DVR expander
- A convenient storage companion for your camcorder
- AV-optimized for smooth playback on your TV
- Small enough to fit in your entertainment center
- USB and eSATA interfaces for maximum flexibility
Expand your DVR storage so you can record more of your favorite TV shows. Or, transfer and store videos from your compatible camcorder to free up space for more recording. Connect the drive to a game console, Blu-ray Disc player or media player, like one from the WD TV family, to smoothly stream video to your big screen TV. It’s the perfect solution for your video storage and playback needs.
Hitachi Hard Drive
Western Digital My Book AV DVR Expander 1 TB USB 2.0/eSATA External Hard Drive
List Price: $ 169.99
Price:
30 seconds later mission accomplished!,
I received my 1TB WD My Book AV Expander today. Here’s how it went down:
Unpack, plug into back of DVR with included eSATA cable, plug WD HDD into wall outlet, turn on DVR and TV. See prompt on TV about new attached storage. Look for and find remote that kids misplaced. Then Press A on remote to format. Wait 30 seconds. Now when I press List it shows 5% Full (used to be 40%). It didn’t even interrupt the current recording. No more taping over my World Cup matches. How easy is that?
So far no heat from new hard drive and it’s whisper quiet. Drive also comes with a USB cable (not needed for this project as the Scientifc Atlanta 8300HD supports eSATA only for adding storage.) From WD’s website this drive is on the list of supported drives for Time Warner SA8300HD but it was still a relief to see it immediately recognized.
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|Works with TIVO HD DVR,
Connection is about a 5-minute job, but initial boot-up takes awhile. Western Digital instructions are incomplete and fairly useless–just diagrams.
Unplug the Tivo power cord. Connect the SATA cable between WD Expander and Tivo. Power on Expander (check for white light in front). Plug in the Tivo power cord. Go to Settings menu on Tivo, then External Storage, then Add. Then, BE PATIENT! It took my unit about 25 minutes to boot and reconfigure everything. A couple of times I thought something might be wrong but I continued to wait and it finally completed and worked. You can also find instruction on Tivo’s Web site. These are basically the same as given here.
The Expander box only shows compatibility with Tivo Series 3 and Premiere. But, that is wrong. I suspect that reviewers who say it does not work with a Tivo HD unit had a defective unit or cable, powered off and on in the wrong sequence, or were impatient and bailed out while the Tivo was still reconfiguring during the initial boot-up.
I bought from a local Best Buy store. Their price is too high ($150). But, I wanted the convenience of easy return in case the reviews saying the Expander would not work with a Tivo HD were correct.
I hope this helps anyone with a Tivo HD that is considering the WD My Book AV DVR Expander.
August 25, 2011 Update:
Several months ago our Tivo started randomly rebooting. This got progressively worse. We started having recordings interrupted or skipped entirely. Over several months dealing with Tivo tech support we finally eliminated all possibilities except the DVR Expander. Once I uninstalled it we had no more random reboots. The unit has a two-year warranty so we had plenty of time left on it. I returned it to Western Digital for a replacement which we have now received. Their return process is very customer friendly. I did have to pay about $17 for shipping return, however.
During one of my many conversations with Tivo Tech Support one person advised that these frequently go bad. They said you are better off buying a Tivo with a bigger hard drive to begin with. But, when we bought our Tivo a larger internal drive was not offered. Since this was a techie, I doubt he was trying to up-sell me. From his standpoint, obviously troubleshooting is easier if you have fewer peripherals attached to the system.
December 20, 2011 Update:
I received the warranty repaired or replacement unit several months ago. I delayed reinstalling it because of having recordings on the Tivo I did not want to lose in the reinstallation process. When I finally did reinstall the MyBook, I only had three recordings stored on the Tivo and did not care if I lost them. To my surprise, I did not lose anything with the reinstall.
The new unit has been up and running for a week now. Everything is good. I have another year left on the warranty. Hopefully, I will have better luck with this one.
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|Works Great, Looks Great,
We have had a TiVo Premiere XL for about 2 months and got this pretty quickly as an accessory along with the wireless-n adapter. This 1TB HD works great and combined with the 1TB internal drive on the Premiere XL I now get 301 HD hrs/up to 2637 SD hrs (I have the SD recording quality set on highest so I actually get 447 sd hrs capacity). Installation was easy as I was used to hooking one of these external HDs up to the cable DVRs (we still haven’t gotten rid of them all yet-still waiting for the “tuning adapter” just for this TiVo). The directions are on the TiVo website, but you basically unplug the TiVo, plug the HD eSATA into the TiVo, then plug in the HD and wait for it to spin up (about 20 secs), then plug the TiVo back in and the on-screen menus will take care of the rest after booting back up. No problems whatsoever with the exception of one time watching a show where there was a hiccup in the recording-not sure whether the recording was on the TiVo HD or the external HD-and rewinding to get it to play again sent the TiVo to do a reset. Only has happened once in 2 months. Very quiet, virtually no HD noise (you can hear spinning if you stick your ear up to it). Looks pretty nice with the single pin dot although you can just as easily hide it behind components if you want.
I was a little hesitant because I have had mixed success with WD externals. One, a 2GB My Book Studio II works great as my main backup with firewire on a Windows 7 x64 PC. Another, an older WD My Book 500gb had lots of issues with the controller card inside and eventually it failed-but I cracked it open (literally because this version at least was not user serviceable) and was able to remove the 500gb HD and put it into an Antec external enclosure and now it works great as a media (audio/video files) drive.
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