The standard Series3 comes with a 250GB drive. Resellers like DVRupgrade have been selling expanded units with up to 1TB of internal storage. And, just a month ago, the TiVo hacking community published the Kickstart 62 code to enable eSATA. With a 1TB eSATA drive, 1.25TB units were possible.
But there was a catch – units with expanded hard drives could not use eSATA. The way the TiVo software handles drives, it has limits on the partitions. The software used to expand the drives made the new partitions interfere with the second drive.
Well, now Engadget is reporting that has changed. The new release of the MFSLive 1.2 boot CD now supports expanded drives *and* eSATA drives. The Release Notes are here, the download is here, or see the MFSLive home page for links to the usage guide, FAQ, etc.
With the new MFSLive CD you can prepare two drives for your Series3 – one internal SATA and one eSATA – which opens the door to a 2TB Series3, using twin 1TB drives. My understanding is that the current TiVo software is limited to supporting 2TB total, so that will be the ceiling for now. (Which I think is quite enough, really.) It probably won’t be long before WeaKnees and DVRupgrade offer pre-expanded units capable of supporting more than 1TB.
A 2TB Series3 should support approximately 300 hours of HD recording and an astounding 2,700 hours of SD recording. If anyone does the 2TB upgrade I’d love to hear how it goes and what the actual reported times are on your unit.
