Silicon Image has a Sata "Drive" that does what pete was talking about and goes up to 2 Terabytes. If you want to build your own, they will sell to OEMs a chip to handle the port addressing for up to 5 drives in a box.
SiI 4726. With current 5 GB drives max capacity using this chip would be 2.5TB. Since I have about 1300 DivX SD shows on 1TB (mostly movies), this would translate to roughly 3200 shows. Whoohoooooo. Let's see- using today's best prices on 300GBs, you could have a 2000 movie collection for 5X$80 or $400 plus the eSata enclosure- maybe $100. Not a bad VOD set up. Tough break Cablecos, and iTms. "Best laid plans of mice and men" and all that.
The
2 TB drive I think I mentioned earlier. DT_DC mentioned this company long ago when discussing the latest Moto 6412's support for eSata's.
But remember Mega's admonition- this is not like an external USB- The same mating between system and drive occurs and you will get teh same results as if you try to swap a drive from one Tivo to another. No go.