Well, like I said, you can always take the recordings off of the Tivo and free up space that way. You could even leave them, un-transcoded, on your Tivo Desktop computer and they'd be available any time you wanted.

As for built-in storage, I agree that there's far too little space on the basic models. However, at least three times now I've seen the Tivo HD XL on Woot for about $180, and that has 150 hours of HD recording. Plus you could add that branded Western Digital drive and get a ton more.