Do they make DVRs with interchangeable hard drives for unlimited storage?

[for fair use]

There are some shows, especially in HD that I just don't want to lose?

[Des]

I don't personally have experience with this, but, a friend of mine has the previous generation of TIVO and I know he installed a 1TB drive on it. Not sure if it was through the USB connection or if he had access to put one inside.

Don't know if that's a help, but it's a direction.

--dES

[DB83]

Ok. So assuming that you can remove the HDD and replace it with a larger one.

How do you intend to play the recordings on the existing HDD without, that is, swapping the drives again. ?

[jman98]

What DB83 said. Plus...

DVRs encrypt what they record. Although you didn't mention it, you can give up the idea, if you had it, that you can just attach your DVR hard drive to a PC and do anything useful with it.

Hard drives eventually fail. So you'll have to find a way to backup this removed and encrypted hard drive anyway, assuming you can. It will likely use a Linux file system, which may be something you're not prepared to handle.

[Noahtuck]

I have never messed with DVR's but some electronics I upgrade with larger HDD's, they need to have the HDD's married to that specific motherboard and I bought some HDD's from a guy a while back and I thought I read it somewhere also, but he said that a lot of DVR's, Tivo, etc. also have their HDD's married to that specific system so it's not as easy as just taking one out and dropping in a bigger one, on top of a proprietary format.

I may be totally wrong about the DVR's but that was my understanding.

[Bjs]

It depends ... what is "proprietary" should be discussed

tivo's, freeview, ect ... devices supplied and or installed by companies either under contract or not use encryption. some can be upgrade.

Then there's non-proprietary types ... these you can swap out, add drives, transfer to pc to edit without any issues

Next question is what are these HD recordings from ? ... Ota is fine, but cable / sat is another mixed bag

[Chopmeister]

While you will lose a bit of quality and have to transfer in real-time, you could always capture the show on a PC, and then use whatever combinations of file server, NAS, external drives or optical media to have effectively unlimited storage.

If your PVR outputs HD over component, then a simple HD capture solution from Hauppauge or Avermedia et al should do the job, and is a relatively inexpensive solution (assuming you already have a computer that meets the spec requirements).

If HD is output over HDMI only then you will need to add something like an HDFury into the mix, which ups the cost/complexity a wee bit and gives an extra slight quality loss due to the extra digital-->analog conversion, but should still work well.