Shaw HD PVR Int Sata upgrade help
 

I have about 18~ HD episodes on my PVR and its just not enough.

So my question is has anyone upgraded from their old internal 120-160gb to a much larger 1TB - 2TB drive without running into compatibility issues?

If it's too complex then anyone have success connecting a external E-sata drive with a generic ext case?

For the price of an E-Sata hard drive externally you're better off just buying Shaw's expander...

You could buy a external with e-sata output for fairly cheap compared to buying the preformated one shaw wants you to buy from em

I think there's a program somewhere that let's you format the drive into the right format


I wonder if I could split/partition a drive so that halfs for PVR and half for my wii games :fullofwin:
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http://ncix.com/products/?sku=47500&...%20WD%20Retail

That's the same one used by Shaw...The cheapest eSata drive I found was $116 for 1TB made by Iomega....I would be the Western Digital over the Iomega anyday. After all, if the drive isn't reliable, there's no point in investing in an expander in the first place.

u might want to double check to see if ur PVR allows upgrading.
i believe older models (since u said 120gb-160gb)do not allow u to upgrade the internal hdd nor plug in an external hdd.
only the newer black ones can allow external plug ins such as the DCX models.

i might be wrong on this but u should really double check on other forums first. i believe i saw the info on the AVSforums long ago.

That's not true. The older models can be expanded with a HDD as well. It's actually even better because you get two hard drives worth of space instead of just one because the black Pace units aren't PVR's.

The expander is only $50 now. Not worth the hassle of buying your own drive.
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^^ Can I get a link? cant find it @ shaw

Any Shaw dealer (London Drugs, Futureshop, etc.) will also have it for $50.

Having a little getting past my confusion to find the right answer.. hoping someone can spell this out for me.

I have a Shaw PVR and a regular 1TB external USB drive... Seems that the Shaw boxes will only recognize sata drivers, is it possible to transfer data from the USB drive to a Sata driver? If so how?? :)

Thanks in advance..

I did mine about 2 months ago. From what I read when doing my research, you basically had to format it first as an external drive (so basically in an eSATA enclosure) connected to your cable box before you could put it in your PVR. (I did this with an older Motorola DCT 3416). It only supports up to 1TB maximum within the firmware.

I'm only guessing on this one but my thought would be that possibly USB doesn't provide enough bandwidth to push the amount of data that's in a HD broadcast hence the requirement that it must be SATA. (assuming I'm understanding your question properly)