e-SATA. Yur killin me!

[scottb4u]

The SFA 8300HD has e-SATA enabled for over a year. Why can't TIVO enable it? It is a safe, closed system and there is no reason for it to not work!

When is this going to be turned on? Anybody care to make an educated guess?

[patroldawg]

yeah, no kidding. i know we weren't guaranteed anything but a good selling point for me was esata capability. well, we're on the last part of november and i still don't see the port enabled. I have a maxtor quickview sitting here ready to go. frustrating

[jmX]

You know how this stuff goes. Rather than waiting potentially forever, i'd suggest you just cut your losses and put an internal one in. I did it the second week I had my S3, and 2 hours later I was done and watching tv on my 750gb tivo...never have to worry or come on here to post complaints about esata again!

Plus its all internal, which is cleaner than a spare box hanging around.

[gostan]

But, be real careful, if you upgrade the internal HD after the cable company sets up your cable cards, as you may lose the full pairing of your cablecards (I have no premium or digital channels) if you do not copy your existing disc image to the new HD. I will be happy to have the upgraded 750GB capacity, but I have to have a Comcast tech back tomorrow to reset the cable cards. I would have sent my HD to Weeknees or figured out how to transfer it myself (I do not have a Windows desktop - only Macs). This is an issue for some and not for others depending upon your local cable company and how they set up the cablecards.

But, definitely consider upgrading the internal hard drive, but only with full knowledge of how to do so. And lets all push Tivo to enable the esata plug in capabilities as soon as possible.

[SullyND]

Why can't TIVO enable it? It is a safe, closed system and there is no reason for it to not work!

Because they need Cablelabs approval to do so, and they have not yet received it (That we are aware of anyway).

in a CableCard device digital content can only be moved off of the box through approved outputs with approved content protection technology, including transfers to an external drive. We have submitted our protection technology to CableLabs for their consideration.

[hookbill]

Thanks Sully. I wasn't quite sure of that answer either.

[Stormspace]

But, be real careful, if you upgrade the internal HD after the cable company sets up your cable cards, as you may lose the full pairing of your cablecards (I have no premium or digital channels) if you do not copy your existing disc image to the new HD. I will be happy to have the upgraded 750GB capacity, but I have to have a Comcast tech back tomorrow to reset the cable cards. I would have sent my HD to Weeknees or figured out how to transfer it myself (I do not have a Windows desktop - only Macs). This is an issue for some and not for others depending upon your local cable company and how they set up the cablecards.

But, definitely consider upgrading the internal hard drive, but only with full knowledge of how to do so. And lets all push Tivo to enable the esata plug in capabilities as soon as possible.

Since Mac's are nothing but intel PC's cloning a TiVo drive should be as easy as with a normal PC. Doing it with the free utilities doesn't involve an operating system anyway. You just jumper your original TiVo drive as master, the replacement as slave and use your CD-Rom to execute the commands. That of course is simply put, but it really isn't very hard.

[Jiffylush]

Engadgethd.com had a guide that was very easy for a non-linux user like myself to use.

Took a little less than two hours, and cost me the use of one cd-r (well, and the cost of the drive). My computer had native SATA so I didn't even have to buy the host adapter.

Now I have some horrible amount of space for recordings, and if the 750 ever fails, I can pop in the old 250 and be watching and recording shows again in minutes.

One thing that I would like to see is more ways to organize my list of shows, I can already see that it is going to be an issue to have to scroll through hundreds of shows to find something.

[Bierboy]

Do you use folders? That would help some.

[Jiffylush]

I do use a little, but is there a way to manually move shows and not just use categories?

[Stormspace]

Engadgethd.com had a guide that was very easy for a non-linux user like myself to use.

Took a little less than two hours, and cost me the use of one cd-r (well, and the cost of the drive). My computer had native SATA so I didn't even have to buy the host adapter.

Now I have some horrible amount of space for recordings, and if the 750 ever fails, I can pop in the old 250 and be watching and recording shows again in minutes.

One thing that I would like to see is more ways to organize my list of shows, I can already see that it is going to be an issue to have to scroll through hundreds of shows to find something.

I use the instructions that Weaknees provides. They are straight forward and very simple to use.

http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/

[Bierboy]

I do use a little, but is there a way to manually move shows and not just use categories?Not to my knowledge. Using folders will put all your "Heroes" into one folder labeled "Heroes" and all your "Lost" episodes in a folder labeled "Lost". But it also dumps all your HD shows into a folder called "HD recordings" which I think is a waste of screen space.