My wife recently ordered a 160GB add-on drive kit from weaKnees for our Hughes HDVR2 DirecTiVo and we installed it last Thursday night. It was a quick and easy install, though the only way we could tell the drive had been properly recognized was to wait until we had recorded enough additional programs to go beyond the 35 hour limit of the original 40 GB drive. Our DirecTiVo now can now store 155 hours of recordings, since the 160 GB drive can hold 120 hours.
It would be nice if the TiVo told you how much drive space was left. The only way to get it to display that info is to enable Backdoors mode. Unfortunately, enabling Backdoors mode on a series 2 TiVo with OS version 3.1 or later is really time consuming. If you have a DirecTiVo that is not hacked to enable the USB ports (which is also a massive pain), you have to remove the master drive from the TiVo as part of enabling Backdoors mode.
Actually, you can see the added space in the System Information screen, which will say, “Variable upt to XXX hours.”
Thanks, Jeff! I should have thought to look there. My DirecTiVo now says “Variable, up to 157 hours”. So, at least I can confirm that the upgrade gave me the extra recording space (plus a little more) than I expected.
I still wish the TiVo software on our HDVR2 provided an easy way to get an estimate of how much space remained. I would even be happy with just knowing what percentage of the total space was available.
Thanks again to weaKnees for providing such an easy to use upgrade kit. I was going to do all the hacking myself, but after many months of not finding time to do it, I decided that the extra cost of the weaKnees kit was worth it. That turned out to be an excellent decision.