No, they haven’t gone pirate, WeaKnees is now offering TiVo and DVR Backup Systems. For the geeks that that means is they’re offering RAID1 drive setups for the TiVo HD and HD XL models, as well as the DirecTV HR20, HR21, HR21 Pro, and HR22 DVRs. For non-geeks, just think of it as two hard drives acting as one. Each drive is an exact mirror of the other, so if one drive dies you don’t lose anything – the other drive still has all the information. So this is a way to configure your TiVo or DirecTV DVR Plus to survive a drive failure, if that worries you. If a drive does fail you can replace just the dead drive, and the system will clone the remaining good drive and you’ll have redundancy again.
The way WeaKnees does this is by using an external RAID1 drive enclosure. This replaces the internal drive in your system.. Basically things are re-cabled to use the external enclosure as the primary storage system instead of an internally mounted drive. They’re offering the external storage configured in 2x320GB, 2x500GB, 2x750GB, or 2x1TB capacities. Note that since the drives are mirrors and store the same data, two 1TB drives gives you 1TB of storage, not 2TB. You have the same 1TB stored redundantly on two drives.
WeaKnees is selling pre-upgraded TiVo HD DVRs and pre-upgraded DirecTV DVR Plus models. As well as upgrade kits for the TiVo HD, TiVo HD XL, and DirecTV DVR Plus models.