I've always been amazed that despite having a couple of USB ports on my cable box and DVR, that the cable company has never offered anything for me to connect to the box, especially something like an external hard drive that could give me additional storage space. I probably could do this on my own, but I'm waiting to see if the cable company would actually be pro-active with its higher-end customers (ha!).
At least one storage company is taking a more pro-active role with adding additional capacity capability to cable DVRs. At this week's NCTA Cable Show, Seagate Technology announced its Seagate Showcase storage series, a group of products aimed at extending the storage capacity of your DVR. The company says the products will be compatible with Motorola's e-SATA-capable DVR set-top systems.
With initial capacities starting at 1TB, Seagate says consumers would be able to keep up to 200 hours of additional HD movies or 1,000 hours of standard definition TV shows. The system will plug into the existing DVR via either USB 2.0 or the e-SATA connection, Seagate says.
Availability of the Showcase products is expected in Q3 2008. It's unclear whether Seagate will sell these directly to consumers, or try to entice cable companies into providing the boxes for their customers.
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