Extremetech has a somewhat speculative article about expanding digital video recorder capacity through external, possible USB, hard drives. Let’s disregard the fact that your typical Tivo, or wannabe DVR you use, probably has more TV recorded each day than you can possibly wathc and still have a normal life. Why would I want to add another peripheral, and power plug, to the mess of cables near my TV? I have a USB drive for my PC, and that thing is noisy too – no way I’d want it on all the time. Seems like upgrading the internal hard drive is more preferable.
The concept is simple: as PVRs fill up with recorded video, consumers either have to delete their recorded content or somehow add more capacity through modifying the PVR with a separate hard drive. A third option, burning content to a built-in DVD, has primarily been confined to Japan.