Maxtor To Ship External Hard Drive For PVRs

[silversurfer]

Although the Maxtor QuickView Expander hard drive will eventually ship in retail, the drive will initially be preformatted for use with satellite and cable set-top boxes, a Maxtor spokeswoman said. The company has not set pricing on the drive, which will hold 160-Gbytes, or enough for 160 hours of standard-definition recording time, Maxtor said.



The new QuickView Expander drive will ship this summer to set-top OEMs. The drive will connect to the set-top either via an external SATA connection or via USB-2, Maxtor spokeswoman Karen Clyne said. An IEEE 1394 connection is being investigated, she said. Although storage vendors have yet to widely offer external SATA drives, the cabling standard supporting external SATA was recently approved

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[BobMurdoch]

Hmmm. Now we just have to get the E* engineers to allow the receiver to see it. This isn't a big deal for me right now, but it might be soon once I hook up my OTA antenna and start recording more HD on my 921.

 

[Mark_AR]

I would invest in at least one.

My 921 is already full. I've had to delete several movies that I wanted to keep because of recent releases that peaked my interest.

*sigh*

 

[Claude Greiner]

I would buy several myself

 

[jrjcd]

i would get it...

 

[Stargazer]

PC PVR with external HD is great for portability and upgradability.

 

[Neutron]

I wonder how it would hook up? If it's USB then Directv needs to activate the USB ports on the Directivo.

 

[Mark Sorensen]

I'd bet: Either Quietly & behind the scenes, or out-front and in-your-face, the Folks in Hollywood will quash this before it hits the market.

They aint too crazy about DVR's anyway.... but they are rabidly opposed to seeing digital transfer of content from the DVR box.

 

[WeeJavaDude]

I wonder how it would hook up? If it's USB then Directv needs to activate the USB ports on the Directivo.

Well it says that USB2 and SATA connection is required. I would assume that USB2 would be how it is down. But more than just enabling the USB would be required. There would have to be both some drive managment work done and driver work to support the external drive.

This is not a simple case of just adding a drive and Woo Hoo. Imagine having programs no the drive and then removing the drive. There is a decent amount of work to support something like this. It is not just add the drive, enable USB and go. Less if all they support is backup and retrieval, but a lot more if they want to support using it for real time storage.