Review on WD 1TB My Book AV DVR Expander HDD - USB 2.0 - WDBABT0010HBK-NESN by Floe Rankin

I love it when something works great right out of the box and this WD eSATA drive did just that. I bought it to expand storage on our Tivo Roamio OTA DVR. Setup was easy (less than 10 minutes from opening the box to installing and ready to go) and increased our total storage capacity from 75 hours to 236 hours of HD programming (or 1618 hours of SD programming). Here are some details. The drive comes with BOTH an eSATA male to male cable and a USB A male to USB mini 5 male cable (plus a small USB pigtail that connects to the USB A goes to something similar to a Mini 5 but slightly different). In our application we needed an eSATA connection so the USB cables were stored in a box for a future project. The connection was direct, followed by a quick cycle through the Tivo initialization screen (Tivo button > Settings & Messages > Settings > Remote, CableCARD & Devices > External Storage) and the drive was ready to use. IMPORTANT: Tivo pairs an external drive with an internal drive and treats the combination as one large storage device. There is no way to treat them as separate volumes or devices. In fact, there's even a warning in the settings that a once-connected drive must be connected whenever Tivo is used. So you can't have multiple eSATA drives on a shelf and just swap them out as standalone storage devices. It just doesn't work that way. I wanted a slightly smaller size but the book size case isn't really a problem as it just sits behind a flat screen TV and the price is right. Also, I won't be disconnecting it from the Tivo on a regular basis, so it's not a big deal. For DVR storage expansion, this product is the absolute winner!