Review: Western Digital My DVR Expander 1TB eSATA

The My DVR 1TB expander from Western Digital is an easy and cost-effective way to add approximately 1,100 hours of SD recording capacity or 140 hours of HD recording capacity to your TiVo HD, TiVo HD XL, or TiVo Series3.

At only $169.99, it provides you with a cheaper alternative to get the same recording capacity of a TiVo HD XL (which carries a $200 premium over the TiVo HD) with the purchase of a TiVo HD that you can later expand.

The My DVR Expander sits external to your TiVo and is about the size of a large paperback book – 5.6 inches x 2.2 inches x 6.8 inches. It needs to be plugged into your AC and into the eSATA port on the back of your TiVo.

Once the device is properly setup, you basically forget that it is there. Kudos to the designers for not putting any annoying bright and blinky LEDs on the front. It simply has a soft amber glow indicating that it is powered on. It also has no buttons or switches to confuse you and runs extremely quietly. I tested this by letting it run just a few feet from my bed and it never disturbed me.

The process of hooking up the My DVR Expander is not at all like adding external storage to a PC… in which the external device gets a new drive letter and you have to manage how you will distribute your storage across the multiple volumes. In true TiVo fashion, the recordings simply “spread out” across all available storage. It is nothing that you have to think about our manage.

The downside of the content being spread across all volumes (i.e. “striped” across your internal drive and the external expander) is that if you unplug the My DVR device from your TiVo, several things happen:

• You can’t take any recordings with you to another TiVo or to a PC. (This is probably on purpose due to content restrictions.)
• You lose most if not all of what is recorded on your TiVo. (This seems like an oversight to me. There should be an advanced menu setting on the TiVo that lets you safely detach the volume and copy back anything that you have space for on the primary drive.)

The fact that you lose most if not all of what is recorded on your TiVo is the most surprising. I would hope that this will be addressed in a future revision of the TiVo software. It seems they’ve made it way too hard for you to ever upgrade to a larger Western Digital My DVR expander that might come to market down the road. (There is reason to believe this could happen given that they’ve recently upgraded from a 500GB product to the 1TB model that I reviewed.)