Western Digital My DVR Expander 500 GB eSATA External Hard Drive
by Western Digital
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List Price: Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Western Digital My DVR Expander 500 GB eSATA External Hard Drive
Customer Review: Great addition to Tivo HD
Summary: 5 Stars
I recently purchased this hard disk to expand the storage on my Tivo. It work just as advertised. There is a larger unit avail now, but for the life of me I don't why anyone would need to store a TB of TV programs they want to watch. 500GB was plenty for me. The Tivo I purchased came with a small disk and I do record many TV programs, more than I watch. So I was constantly concerned about running out of space. Its nice to have a lot of choices when I do sit down to watch TV. Installation was an absolute breeze. You power down your Tivo, hook up the cables, power on the disk, then the Tivo. Tivo is up and running as normal and lets you know it has detected the disk. It takes several hours before it starts making use of the disk, but you can start using Tivo immediately. That was it. I noticed that the Tivo suggestions started getting a lot more. So far I am very pleased with this purchase. To buy a Tivo with this much storage would have cost much more. This is a very good, very simple, upgrade.Customer Review: Excellent purchase
Summary: 5 Stars
The Western Digital DVR Expander 500 GB works excellently with a cable DVR box. I have one on both of my HD DVR boxes. I have had one for more than two years. So when I saw the price go down to around $100, I bought another one for the second box. It is money well spent. I haven't regretted buying the extender for one minute. This weekend, I went out of town and I taped all the Olympic coverage in HD. I think it taped 11 hours on Saturday and 10 hours on Sunday. There was probably another 7-10 hours of HD programming previously saved on the DVR. When I checked it this morning, it was at 37% full. Incredible. Before the DVR extender, the Super Bowl in HD filled up the old DVR. Set up is a breeze. Connect it to your cable box, power it up, power up the cable box, and it asks you if you'd like to connect the two together. Click OK and you're done.
If you're contemplating buying the WD 500 DVR extender, wait no more. You won't be disappointed.
Customer Review: Good but was it the best choice?
Summary: 4 Stars
If you want to keep it simple, buy this, it works. It requires no technical savvy to set up ... the plugs fit only one way ... plug it in and go.
However in retrospect I'm not sure this was the best deal. Would another eSATA drive have worked? Does it even need to be external, adding cables and complexity to the setup? A friend opened his TiVo and put in a 1TB drive! Now he had downloaded some tools and done his homework - not for the faint of heart - but now he's got more capacity and fewer cables and power bricks as a reward for his effort. WeakKnees.com sells kits for this, but he said he downloaded a tool for free that let him use a commodity drive.
I'm not shy about technology, and I wish I had shopped around more and evaluated my choices. I think this is packaged for novices, and I'm a little sorry I didn't look farther. It's not the best deal for a drive of this capacity, but hey, it does say "TiVo" on the package!
Customer Review: Easy to install works great
Summary: 4 Stars
Well to start off, I have had this a little over a month but it works flawlessly and was a breeze to install. I have many usb and even a few sata external HDs over the years. Almost all have a noise and or a longevity problem being always on, usually due to a cheap fan or poor cooling. This unit seems very well built and is noiseless comapred to other media units.
Installation was a breeze, just follow the enclosed instructions and it will just work. My first cable card installed ok, but this was 10x easier and no stress.
It is a bit pricey and I know there are hacks that can be done to larger and less expensive external and even internal drives. But having gone the cheap route in the past and having to deal with HDs that go bad after a year or so I decided that I would go with a better quality device that was certified for this job and I am glad I did. I took one star off for not having a 1TB option at this time.
Customer Review: Don't trust Western Digital to tell you the truth!
Summary: 1 Stars
After being informed by Western Digital that their 1 TB DVR Expander unit was not compatible with my Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 HDC, the Western Digital technical service representative told me that I had to get the 500 GB unit instead, since that is the one that is compatible with my DVR box. Unfortunately, I listened to this representative (who was either lying outright or or just too lazy to pay attention when he gave me this instruction). When I got the 500 GB unit, not only did it also fail to work but it also wiped out every recording from the last month on my DVR. Only after this did another rep now tell me that NONE of their DVR expanders work with the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 HDC.
After this shoddy customer service experience, I will never buy another Western Digital Product again, and I strongly recommend that none of you do either (unless you don't mind having your recordings erased and your time wasted).