I never expected to be doing this. When I first joined the “TiVolution” back in February 2005 with my 80-hour Humax TiVo unit, I was coming off of a 40-hour ReplayTV box that I had never really come close to filling. (Before we continue, let’s be clear: an 80-hour unit isn’t really an 80-hour unit unless you record on the lowest, crappiest quality. But for convention’s sake, it’s still called an 80-hour unit.) Little did I know that with the ease of use of the TiVo, combined with the suggested recordings it makes based on your viewing habits, I would soon have a much larger digital video collection.

As I was running out of space, I started thinking about ways to preserve recordings. One option was to use the TivoToGo (TTG) service, which allowed me to transfer recorded shows from the TiVo to my PC. However, there were two major problems with this: first, it was incredibly slow, on the order of 40 minutes or so just to transfer a one-hour show; second, the files were digitally protected, which meant that I could only play them on computers which had the TTG software installed and authorized to my TiVo account. There are ways to convert those files, but it’s a fairly time-consuming process and not something I want to do two or three times a month.

So after hearing a lot about the possibility of upgrading your TiVo’s capacity, and knowing a friend who was able to do it successfully, I decided to check it out myself. I spent a week or so perusing articles around the web and various threads at the TiVo Community Forums, then sat around and waited for a good hard drive deal. I knew I wanted either a 160GB or 200GB hard drive, and when Outpost.com had a sale on Maxtor 200GB drives for only $69.99 I grabbed one right away.

In the rest of this article, I will detail my own experience adding a 200GB hard drive to my Humax T800 to make a 313-hour to 325-hour TiVo (depending on which calculations you believe). There are several other write-ups out there on upgrading TiVos, so why am I writing this? Well, the others are often very generic instructions, trying to accommodate all different models of TiVos and all possible scenarios of upgrades. I generally found that 60-70% of the text in the other tutorials was unnecessary for me, either because it was for people in different situations (i.e., upgrading a TiVo that already has two drives in it) or because it was explaining things I (and any tech-savvy user) already knew, like what master and slave mean in the context of a PC. So in this article I’m aiming to condense the information you need to upgrade your single-drive late-model Series 2 TiVo.

OK enough introductory blabber. Onward!