Anyone use TiVo?

[Undertoad]

I have it, and it's just as addictive as they say.

Unfortunately the first unit's hard drive died after 6 months and I had to send it back and get another.

As a consumer unit, the hard drive is the weak link in the chain for TiVo. There aren't too many VCR-like devices that have a 50% chance of dying in the first five years of its life, but that's what hard drives do. Hard drives are rated by MTBF, "Mean Time Between Failure", the point at which half the drives will develop some kind of problem.

Since the TiVo is effectively using its hard drive ALL THE TIME, whether you want it to or not (it's constantly caching video for its live TV buffer), you can expect that MTBF number to be accurate; if you're buying a TiVo, you should EXPECT it to fail at some point.

It is, in fact, a Linux system. It's a computer, and computers go bad.

But the good news is that since it's a computer, there is a remarkable community of geeks ready to help get the most out of that box. To me, this more than makes up for the possible problems that develop.

Via that community, people have put together a step-by-step guide to managing your TiVo hard drive; and with the help of that guide, last week I changed our 60-hour TiVo into a 137-hour TiVo by swapping out the hard drive for a new, bigger one.