spaceship.ca

I’ve raved about Tivo to nearly everyone I know – it’s changed the way I think about TV. Watching regular TV causes me physical pain, what with the lack of pause, fast forward and where someone else controls the schedule.

One of the things to be aware of with Tivo is that if you don’t watch a show it will be deleted to make room for new recordings, unless you tell Tivo not to delete the show. However, if you keep too many shows there won’t be room to record anything new.

The downside of this approach is that Tivo now becomes yet another inbox that I need to maintain – like email, voice mail or my to-do lists. I’ve often spent an evening watching shows I was only vaguely interested in, just so I can delete them to make room for something else. You can imagine the crushing anxiety this kind of stress can cause!

Like all of life’s problems, the answer is simply more technology. Or in this case, a bigger hard drive.

Tivo is made from commodity hardware, and it’s using the same general parts used on all PCs (and Macs these days for that matter). Any new hard drive will work, as long as it’s IDE. 300GB drives just hit the magic $100 price point, which is the max I’ll spend for a hard drive. The base “40 hour” Tivo ships with a 40GB hard drive so this makes for a significant upgrade.

It’s not as simple as “open case, drop in hard drive” as you need to set up the drive with the Tivo software. The best way to do this is to hook the old drive and the new drive up to your PC, boot from a special disk, and run a command line program to transfer the operating system and settings over. If you’ve spent time inside a computer case you shouldn’t have too much trouble with it, and the end result speaks for itself:

Yeah, that’s a lot of Mythbusters episodes.

For the record, here’s the drive I purchased and the software I used. You’ll also need a set of Torx bits to get into the case.

Thanks to Seafoam for cracking the case first and proving that it works.