While both WeaKnees and DVRupgrade have been offering special order upgraded units with up to 2TB of capacity for a while, WeaKnees announced in their blog that they’re making the 2TB Series3 an official offering on their site. The 2TB unit has one internal 1TB drive and on eSATA 1TB drive. What does 2TB of capacity get you? How about up to 292 hours of HD content, or a staggering 2777 hours of SD content? Yeah, you need to be a serious couch potato, or someone who likes to archive a lot of content, to use that much capacity.
I rarely had issues with the default 250GB drive in my S3, and since I added the official 500GB eSATA drive I have more space than I know what to do with. As more of the content I like moves to HD, I’ll probably need the space though. Right now, most of what I record is still SD.
How much will this TiVo-of-plenty set you back? $1599 after the current $200 rebate. It is an expanded Series3, not a TiVo HD, so you do get the nice remote, fancy case, and THX certification for that money. That’s worth it… right?
I asked DVRupgrade about their plans to offer a similar unit. They said that, while they do currently sell ‘off the menu’ upgrades, such as 2TB units, as special orders, they do not currently have any plans to make a 2TB unit a standard offering on their site. They cited a low demand for the larger capacity units, likely due to the higher costs, even with an increase in demand due to the current $30 Hitachi rebate. They prefer to stress the higher reliability of single drive units over the dual-drive configurations.
