With the hard-drive capacities of personal video recorders swelling beyond 100 gigabytes, Matt Haughey of PVRblog (which is an excellent new blog, by the way) asks a good question: “How much space do I need in a new TiVo?”
Say you had a 30-40 hour maximum Tivo and you watched maybe two hours of TV a day (say, The Daily Show, an episode of Frontline, and a Simpsons episode). Typically a TiVo will record more hours than you can watch (especially as it grabs shows it thinks you might like), so there will be a good deal of attrition, and sometimes that is a problem. For the ~40hr tivo, this would mean that shows would typically last 3-4 days on your Tivo before deleting themselves to make way for new shows. If you have time to sit down and watch recorded TV every couple days, a smaller tivo drive will work fine. If, on the other hand, you only find time on weekends to watch the previous week’s TV you will run into problems. Problems take the form of things like being furious that last week’s Six Feet Under was deleted before you ever got to see it, and the repeats of it weren’t taped because TiVo already had a copy of it (which was eventually deleted).
Here at Gizmodo HQ we have one of the very first models that came out, a Series 1 TiVo with a scant 14 hours of recording time. Though we wouldn’t mind having more, we rarely have time to watch all of the shows we’re recording anyway, so upgrading just to make it possible to record yet more shows hasn’t been much of an issue.
