TiVo Hard Drive upgrade: complete (upgrade porn)

I just got done upgrading my Sony DirecTiVo from 40GB to 80GB. I didn't really need the extra space, but the original drive was starting to die. The motor was making these horrible whining noises that were audible 8 feet away.

So, I decided to take action. I read the Hinsdale TiVo upgrade how-to and found it very complete and almost to the level of the Empeg drive upgrade FAQ. I also read something about Maxtor's new drives with fluid bearing motors and how quiet they are. I knew I had to use one of these. I ordered an 80GB D740X from Newegg. It arrived today and I performed the upgrade today.

The swap took a little over 4 hours. But, this is only because I wanted to copy all the shows from the old drive to the new one. You can see some porn below.
http://spmicro.com/gallery/tivo_hd

No ethernet? Darn. I deperately want a DirecTiVo plus the new TurboNet card. I should probably wait until I have a job though. (This marks the 1000th time I've mentioned I'm unemployed!)

I think someone has made "AirNet" now. Obviously, they just stuck an 802.11b card in there somehow. This is much more appealing to me. Though, Until my TiVos can share programming like Replay 4000s, I seen no pressing need to add ethernet at all.

Reeeleee? /me slathers

I don't have a pressing desire to share programming, though it might be nice for those times when there are more than two shows on at one I want to watch (distributed TiVo-ing amongst friends). What I really want to do is transfer the video to my computer so I can edit it to take out the commericals and then archive it onto VCD.

AirNet website

Now that's interesting. I wonder if the wireless loses anything from being inside the metal Tivo case? Probably not enough to matter. Very clean install.

FWIW, I added a 60GB drive to my 30GB Tivo SA and added an original Tivonet card about 3 weeks ago. I popped the drives into another computer to run the scripted upgrade and network config. I spent an extra $5 when I ordered the Tivonet card and got the config tool compilation CD, which I felt was worth it (I did have to tweak 1 script...changed an environment var IIRC, but it worked without any other hitches).

I connected up the ethernet by cutting another rectangular hole above the RJ-11 jack just big enough to jam in an RJ-45 FF adapter and secured it from the inside with (what else?) JB Weld. Fairly neat in the end, but the Airnet would have saved me yet another 50-foot patch cord draped around the room!

Bye, bye warranty! (but it's working great!)

Jim