external storage drawbacks?

Only if it stops working. You then lose everything on it. It's not a standalone item - it needs internal data of the Roamio to function. No swapping back and forth. I archive to my PC using Desktop which saves to an external USB 1TB drive that is not subject to this restriction.

 

YES!

When you add external storage it stripes the content across both your internal and external drives. If you loose either drive you loose all content on both drives.

I had an external drive setup several years ago and the marriage got corrupted, the only thing I could do was divorce the drives and I lost everything.

Way too much can go wrong under that setup.

I rarely say anything like this, but: I WOULD STAY AS FAR AWAY AS POSSIBLE FROM EXTERNAL CONNECTED STORAGE.

Now, if you want to set the drive up a Lan drive and MRV content to it for long term storage that is pretty safe and works pretty well with either PyTiVo or the old TiVo desktop utilities.

 

Only certain WD drives would work anyhow. If it did not list tivo applicability, then it would not work.

 

I got the WD My Book AV Extender from TiVo and it failed after a month. It only has to fail once.

 

I've had 2 WD external drives fail. One tivo and one for a pc. The drive itself was fine but the board inside that provides the esata interface failed.

 

I've had two WD My DVR expanded on my two Premieres for a couple of years now no issues at all. You got A bad unit it happens that sometimes drives fail this is true of the drive inside your TiVo also. That doesn't mean that they are all bad, always an error waiting to happen.

 

External drives have a higher failure rate. It's. It usually the drive but the case itself. I have so many drives from external cases that work fine once removed from a bad case.