New Help Coming For Storage Anxiety Disorder
I’ve used a PVR for the last five years and despite the fact that the hard drives have consistently gotten larger, I’ve suffered from SAD (Storage Anxiety Disorder) from day 1. With my first TiVo I had access to about 32 hours of recording capacity, which I soon found out wasn’t nearly enough to even fit a week’s worth of programming. This actually created quite a bit of stress, If I happened to go on vacation for a few days or just tune out of TV because I was then faced with making tough choices on what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to watch later on.
When I got my dual tuner HDTV Motorola box, I figured my new 180 GB hard drive would help to alleviate some of my issues, but once you go HDTV there is no going back to SDTV and with only about 10 – 15 hours of HDTV recording capacity, the Motorola box turned out to be even worse then my TiVo when it came to my SAD.
Now with the TiVo series 3, supposibly being shipped today, I finally go to a 250 GB hard drive, but even with 250 GB, TiVo is predicting that I should only get about 30 hours of HDTV content. If TiVo to Go was an option or even external storage, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but considering that the cable labs were able to initially ban these features, I’ll need to work out a solution for the near term.
My solution has been to order a hard drive upgrade kit from Weaknees that will allow me to go to 750 GBs and while 90 hours of HDTV recording capacity is starting to get closer to a level that I’m comfortable with, Seagate has given me reason to hope that there may be a longer term cure to my SAD in the not so near future.
Seagate realizes that I’m not the only one with SAD and that the PVR is really starting to be embraced by consumers and so they have announced that they are working on 2.5 terrabyte drive that will allow consumers to store up to 4,000 hours of SD content and about 350 hours (my math not theirs) of HDTV content. While the 2.5 TB hard drive won’t be for everyone, I’m excited by the possibility of being able to record an entire season of 24 and then go back to watch it all at once. While I’m sure that the cable companies and content owners may have some objections, if someone was really creative, they could record 4,000 hours of television and then disable their cable for three months and save $200, and then sign up for another month. Only time will tell if there is really demand for a storage option this large, but with more shows begining to show up in HDTV format and with greater demand for control over TV, this would certainly be something that I might use to help solve my storage anxiety disorder.
*Warning – While a 2.5 TB drive may solve my SAD, it is certain to lead to other forms of social anxiety disorder.
Posted on September 18th, 2006 by Davis
Filed under: Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, TV, TiVo