WD My DVR Expander

[essential]

I was recently looking into getting an external drive to get some more hours out of my DVR. I have a SA-8300, and on the Western Digital site, they have something called a "My DVR Expander" that says it's tested to work with the SA-8300.

Can this possibly be better than any other e-sata drive? Could they have done something differently with this drive to make it function better/longer with a DVR than any other external drive or is this all marketing so they can charge more?

Thanks.

 

[sparks]

I don't think it will work any better than any other standard esata drive, I bought a generic one from Newegg a while ago and it worked fine, but I checked on AVS forum to see that it worked before I bought it. One other caveat to expanding the SA8300, if your cable company is Time Warner the DVR is using the Passport OS and if you use an external drive, you lose the ability to use trickplay (pause, rewind, forward) on live TV. If you are not in Time Warner and your DVR uses the SARA OS, then you should be fine.

 

[jkresh]

It's mostly but not entirely marketing. If your dvr is set up to work with any esata drive then the wd is a waste of time, but some are locked to certain drives and the WD is the only one (or one of a few) to work with them without a hack.