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

There are many reviews on this product covering most aspects. But I haven't seen one that covers the angle I'm trying to give here: using this external hard drive with two different TIVO DVRs and even transferring it to a computer. I bought this drive 7 months ago to increase capacity. my old TIVO premiere. So it worked fine. Most of the time there weren't any issues, although I did experience occasional crashes while watching soccer games. I suspect this happened when part of the recording was on TIVO's internal hard drive and part on this external drive. Switching quickly from one to the other wasn't always very smooth. Then I switched to the new TIVO-roamio and transferred this external drive to the new DVR. The process was simple enough, but it wasn't possible to transfer and keep (at least part of) the old recordings on that hard drive. This is not a defect of this hard drive. This is a shortcoming of the TIVO software. After the transfer, I conducted another experiment by turning off the dashcam, unplugging the drive, and plugging it into a Windows computer. It was unrecognizable. I remembered that TIVO uses a Linux-based operating system, so I also tried to connect it to a Linux machine: the result was the same. No amount of Linux disk mounting magic I could think of solved the problem. It seems that TIVO guarantees that whatever you record on this external hard drive will not remain accessible to any other device (including other TIVO DVRs). Every time you transfer it from a TIVO DVR to something else, you have to reformat it and lose all the old data on it.