How much of a premium would you pay on a hard drive for your PVR?

[Mark Holtz]

The prices that I have listed for the hard drives comes from the 5/18 listing of PriceWatch is a little low, but gives you some idea of the cost that the hard drive will add to the PVR price.

To give you some idea of the out-of-box conditions:
508 - $299 with 80GB Hard Drive (Dish Depot)
721 - $519 with 120GB Hard Drive (Dish Depot)
522 - No price announced, probably 120GB Hard Drive

HDVR2 - $249 with 40 GB Hard Drive (American Satellite)
DSR7000 - $249 with 40GB Hard Drive (American Satellite)

The DirecTivos are upgradable, but the largest hard drive that can be replaced is a 120GB.

[gcutler]

Not sure what your asking, are you taking about like getting a 508 with a factory installed 250GB drive for an extra $260, or buying a 250GB drive for $260 myself and putting it in myself, or paying someone else to do the work, or something else althogether???

[Mark Holtz]

The prices listed above are the current hard drive prices for EIDE drives according to pricewatch. It would be a safe bet that it's the price that Dish and the makers of the DirecTivo's pay for their hard drives.

Having said that, how much are you willing to pay for extra storage on your PVR? Basing my estimate that 1 GB=45 minutes, the approximate record times would be:

40 GB - 30 Hours (Just over 1 Day)
80 GB - 60 Hours (2.5 Days)
120 GB - 90 Hours (3.75 Days)
160 GB - 120 Hours (5 Days)
180 GB - 135 Hours (Just over 5.5 days)
200 GB - 150 Hours (6.25 Days)
250 GB - 187 Hours (Around 7.75 days)

So, therefore, if the 40GB HD is replaced with the 250GB HD, would you pay the additional $206?

[Steve Mehs]

In all honesty, 30 hours suites me well, I hardly ever let programs stay on the hard drive for more then 2 days before deleting. But having a 508 will let me rest easier when I'm on vacation without having to worry about if all my shows were able to fit on a 40GB drive. More time/bigger hard drive is always a plus, but it would be not be practical for me to have anything over 80GB, since I'd probably never use it.

[gcutler]

I would probably not pay anything to upgrade my 508, but my SA TiVo (with only 40MB, plus having to deal with quality selections) I would pay up to $200 for whatever drive space is allowable, but since the 120MB per drive is a limitation, I'd just settle for adding 120MB for $94 (I have one empty drive bay in my SA TiVo)

[John Corn]

I bet I've never reached 60 hrs. of programming before deleting it on my 721.

[Big Bob]

The 721 has more than enough room for my house. It hold way more than we could ever watch in any reasonable amount of time.

If there were more room, one might be tempted to use the hard drive as permanent storage. That would be a very foolish thing to do. Regardless of the stability of Dish software, hard drives just fail all by themselves. Thinking that you could have a library of video on a hard drive is just asking for disaster.

Now if there were some way to have removable storage, I would be interested. But that will not be happening anytime soon. :(

[Karl Foster]

I paid $83 for a 80GB last November and $120 for a 120GB in Apr '02. I get 70 hours on one UTV and 105 on the other. I'd pay the same amount again without even thinking about it. An easy upgrade on a UTV - juts slide the old one out and slide the new one in. UTV currently can't handle more than 137GB, so anything larger than 120GB for me is a waste of money. I have movies on my family room UTV that I recorded last July that are still there ane work perfectly.

[Jacob S]

Doesnt Dish reserve so much space on the hard drive for their own use? If that is so then how many more hours could there be if they did not reserve their space on the hard drive? Also if it is a poorer quality then wouldnt it get 2 or 3 times as many hoursj on the hard drive?

[Mark Holtz]

On the intergrated PVRs (both Dish and DirecTV), there is no "quality" setting, or, for that matter, a MPEG encoder chip. The receivers record the data stream direct from the provider.