Why would you ever need a 3T Bolt+ recorder

Many many folks have that much storage. I do, and I don't necessarily have any intent of watching it all. But, I record stuff for my kids, stuff I may watch with my SO, and series that I have heard good things about but am not ready to watch yet. A few seasons later I may binge it, or if it dies an early death i may kill all recorded episodes at once.

Olympics were a great time to have tons and tons of space. Record everything, watch what I found interesting.

 

I agree; it's pathetically small, especially in light of 10 TB hard drives now available. I bought a new Bolt+ and immediately had Weaknees upgrade it to 11 TB. TV season is not yet half over and it's at 27% full.

 

I generally felt the same way. It didn't seem like it was worth it to have so much space, but once I had it I enjoyed being able to record every episode of a series and binge watch as desired, without having to even think about space.

For example, Big Bang Theory alone eats up about 700 GB in HD. It'd add up quickly if there were a second or third show I wanted.

What Tivo charges for the extra space is another matter. It can be pragmatic to buy the cheaper model and upgrade the drive on your own.

 

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Because 500gb is far too small? Because 4 tuners is at least occasionally too few? The extra cost of additional drive space really isn't much. I run about 50% capacity on my 3tb drive. I suppose I could delete some stuff, but why bother when it is pretty cheap to have extra capacity.

 

Humorously, I have shows on my 120GB Series 2 TiVo that I still haven't watched, after 1 or 2 years. But it feels good to have the shows, in case I want to watch them, one snowy day. I guess that humans, like squirrels, are hoarders?

 

I am glad I installed a 3TB in a Roamio Basic (comes with 0.5TB), up to 3TB is soooo easy. If I was going to go through the effort, spending extra $'s for a larger drive seemed reasonable. I use an antenna. Right now its at 54% with a bunch of stuff I will probably never watch but this way I don't have much to think about, just record all the new fall shows, all broadcast football. I also use it to avoid the cliffhanger type episodes. I'll binge watch them.

So basically its because I am lazy.

 

3-10T of storage, and still no way to organize it. Sigh...

 

My 3TB Roamio Pro is generally 60-70% full. When I go on vacation I often come back to it being around 80% full. And I'm not someone who keeps things forever; once I watch something, I delete it.

 

"needs"? No.

Wants! Absolutely!

After upgrading my Roamio Pro to 3 TB, I finally changed basically all of my prime time recordings to HD.. (I still record late night talk shows and some documentaries, etc. in SD). I purposely record way more than I can watch, so I have new stuff all summer or during rerun breaks (which we're about to enter).. I *also* have gone back and watched YEARS old recordings. Sometimes I nuke stuff, but I want the ability to decide how much I record..

I actually wish I had more than 3 TB, since that's the recorder with 6 tuners in it. (I have a 6 TB drive in my Premiere 4, but the Tivo only thinks it's 4 TB.. need to get it to a Windows machine at some point to run some Windows-only upgrade tools.)

 

You must have a cable system that copy protects everything. On Comcast, I was able to move everything except some movies that I had recorded on HBO. And like others, I've got a number of movies recorded for future watching as well as a number of whole seasons of shows that we'll start watching over the summer. We're running about 60% on our Roamio Pro right now.

Scott

 

I have a Roamio basic model (used OTA only) that I upgraded to 3TB. It's usually about 50 to 70% full because we delete most shows after watching them. I'm sure if we had cable it would be full most of the time. As to tuners, even with just antenna offerings there are times that 3 tuners are recording something. Add that there are also 4 TiVo minis in the house any of which can use one of the Roamio's 4 available tuners it's very possible to run out of tuners. If the 6 tuner Bolt did OTA I'd probably buy one. So yes, many people could "get by" with 500gb and 4 tuners, but for a whole home DVR system additional storage and tuners are a welcome addition.

 

There are many households with multiple people in them such as a relatively small family of mom and dad and two kids (sometimes more kids) and there are timer conflicts galore and the HDD fills up fast. True, a few recordings may end up never being watched, but most are and the "kids" (teens and young adults) seem to love binge watching and will record every "Seinfeld" on every channel, and they do WATCH nearly ever one of them.

My brother with wife and 2 daughters are constantly having timer and not enough tuner issues and the HDD (2TB) fills up and they end up deleting others recordings without telling them so they can record new stuff. None can necessarily get to seeing their recordings soon after recording, so they do watch them in a few weeks when they have the time, and they do sit and watch, but in the meantime, those recordings take up space and risk being deleted by the sibling or mom or dad, and mom or dad hold the trump cards.

Now, consider the Hopper3 with 16 tuners. That is not a DVR for someone living alone or even childless couple, but for families or multiple person households, and let me tell you, families and like households LOVE them.

Just because a product may not make sense to you or me doesn't meant it isn't a great fit--a gift from the heavens--for others. Who would need all those super sized items for sale at Costco? Certainly not a single person (some items do make sense even for one person such as vitamins) but the economics provide for big savings if it is used by a family or multiple person household. And I do know people who "pooh-pooh" Costco and think it is a useless scam, but they've never done the math or just live in bread alone.

 

Good points as to family use. 500GB currently is fine for me, as a single person family. But if a 4-person family, I likely could see and would up that base to 2TB or, more likely, 3TB, given the small price difference between 2TB and 3TB replacement drives.

 

8TB Roamio Pro is 72% full; 3TB Roamio OTA is 74% full. Lots of viewers in the home, with varied tastes, and several who are away from home most of the time meaning content is allowed to pile-up rather than a shorter retention window.

I'll get around to trimming old content when I get around to it, rather than being forced to snuff content before it becomes available via one of the subscribed streaming services.

To each their own.

 

I have never gotten to more than 60% of my 500GB capacity so I too have a hard time understanding the need (real or imagined) for multi-terabyte drives. However, there are only 2 of us in the household and we rarely watch more than 3 hours of scripted shows in a day so we are probably not typical. PLus we are OTA only so our choices are limited (also have Netflix and Amazon video). I also delete a show once I've watched it. My son, OTOH, never deletes anything so his (Comcast) DVR is always 99% full. He just lets the DVR software delete what it needs to to make room for new shows. It is nice to know that upgrading the drive capacity is pretty straightforward and inexpensive, should the need (or desire) arise.

 

I have a 2TB Premiere XL4 and now a 3TB Roamio OTA. Realistically, I have no need for a 3TB OTA DVR, but it wasn't that much more than a 2TB drive, so what the heck. I'm not sure if I will keep cable or not, even if I do, the Roamio OTA effectively gives me at least 1/4 of my 2TB drive back during the Olympics, probably more, since I can record the network NBC feed on the Roamio OTA, and save the Premiere for the cable offload channels. With a 3TB drive, I think I can record every network feed Olympic broadcast for the whole 2 weeks, and pick and choose the bits and pieces that I want to watch, if not, it's darn close.

Right now, my Premiere XL4 is 3% full, and my Roamio OTA is 1%. I'm guessing that for the average xx-1 OTA channel versus the average Comcast HD channel, the Roamio OTA fills up a bit faster per hour with a 3TB drive than the XL4 with the 2TB, but it varies a lot channel to channel, and the Roamio OTA will fill up at more than double the rate hour for hour when my favorite HD channels are down-rezzed and MPEG-4-ized on Comcast.

At the same time, my 2TB Premiere XL4 probably has more hour capacity on Comcast than a 3TB Roamio on FiOS, so that's another reason to have a big drive. Hopper 3's hard drive is 2TB, so that's probably equivalent to 3TB on Comcast MPEG-2, 1.5TB or so on Comcast MPEG-4, and 4TB or more on FiOS. The DVR itself looks really interesting, too bad DISH has lousy picture quality, and doesn't serve the NYC market or any of CT (they will install, but they are missing a ton of our sports channels so they may as well not be here at all).

All that being said, when I had roommates, the XL4 would, at times, run all 4 tuners for parts of several nights in a row, and it was in the 20-40% full range before Sochi, and got over 80% during Sochi. With just me, the XL4 got over 90% full and puked during Rio due to other things going on in my life those weeks where I got way behind the ball and had to triage for about a week to avoid losing stuff.

I finally realized, after having big backlogs of TV that I need to either watch or delete within a few weeks of something airing, as otherwise I'm never going to watch the stuff. It's kind of ridiculous to be recording huge numbers of shows and leaving them on a DVR for months, which is what I am doing. There is so much streaming stuff out there to watch, and that ends up being the majority of what I watch other than live sports, which are recorded and deleted within a day or two at most.

My mom, who can't seem to clean anything out, or manage anything properly, has her X1 DVR at like 95% most of the time, which, to be fair, is the equivalent of my XL4 at 24%, but still.

 

Are you sure you aren't new here?

FOr me, even back in 2002 I had 3TB of storage available for my HD recordings. I used twelve 250GB hard drives in a tower case for storage from my PCs I had set up for OTA HD recordings.
When the first HD TiVo came out in May 2004(from DirecTV), it was a godsend. And allowed me to record from DirecTV and OTA in a small box. But I only expanded them to two internal drives with a total of 500GB of storage which was not enough since they couldn;t be transferred over the network. Now I have 5TB in my Roamio Pro and 4TB in each of my Bolts. IN addition to 5TB of storage in my KMTTG/TiVo Desktop PC.

OF course I don't expect to watch everything I record. Not even close. I would be lucky to watch even 15% of it. But I never know what I will be in the mood to watch. SO the more choices I have the more likely I will have something available to watch for the mood I'm in.

And all this is in addition to the 129TB of storage I use for movie storage. From my three unRAID servers. But with each Blu-ray Disc averaging around 31GB, the storage space for the rips shrink quickly.

 

I did a smaller version of this with this past Summer's Olympics, and the problem really came down to, finding the time to watch it all. But I'd rather have that embarrassment of riches than lack of space.