TiVo Bolt: Speed, More Speed, and Instant Ad Skipping

[jayn_j]

Adding to Gadgetfreak's comments. The Roamio and Bolt are true plug and play. You simply put in an unformatted drive up to 3 TB and the TIVO will format it automatically. TIVO supports software to transfer your recordings to an external drive for storage. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on a Mac (or linux)

 

[SatelliteGAL]

Thanks
I'm really considering a Bolt. So, if I can build a desktop I can replace the drive in a TIVO? I "assume" there are special drives you would need to buy and there are size limits?
My rental costs on equipment are really high. I feel it would pay for itself soon enough.

 

[gadgtfreek]

Im not sure on the Bolt, the tivo community has threads on replacing the drive. I did it on my Roamio (went from 500gb to 2TB) and it was easy, I don't think the bolt is hard either. You will lose settings and recordings of course, but the OS is stored on ROM I guess because once you swap the drive it boots right up. Pretty neat, and easy. Swapping the drive does void the warranty though...

 

[osu1991]

The bolt is a little harder to disassemble than the roamio. I would check TiVo Community Forums there is a thread on changing the Bolts drives. Some have used 3.5 in drives with an external enclosure and other have used 2.5 in laptop drives. I replaced the original 500gb drives on all 4 of my roamios with 2 and 3TB Western Digital AV drives. Very simple change

 

[SatelliteGAL]

Well, hubby traded his Hilton Honors points for BB gift cards so the boxes didn't cost us anything. I bought two 1TB Bolts and one mini. I'll buy another mini when the room is done and it will replace my FIOS system. I bought the "all in" on both Bolts. We will save $70 per month on our FIOS bill. It is a slight learning curve but over all we like the Bolts. They respond faster than the FIOS boxes and the apps we use the most are built in. I'm not even going to worry about the hard drive size unless we find we need it. So, bottom line from someone who has not really had TIVO is that we like it so far. A lot of things are much better with the TIVO.

 

[gadgtfreek]

Moving into cord cutting I ordered another tivo as a backup to use in the bedroom (Roamio OTA with no fees), and had no idea it would see the Bolt so easily. I can access the Bolt playlist from the menu, very cool.

I love the commercial skip feature, but its Netflix and Amazon apps can be buggy (Bolt). I just use Roku and Fire TV for that stuff.