Digital Home Thoughts: External HDD For Your PVR, Courtesy Maxtor

"Maxtor Corp. said Tuesday that it will ship an external hard drive specifically designed to connect to personal video recorders. Although the Maxtor QuickView Expander hard drive will eventually ship in retail, the drive will initially be preformatted for use with satellite and cable set-top boxes, a Maxtor spokeswoman said. The company has not set pricing on the drive, which will hold 160-Gbytes, or enough for 160 hours of standard-definition recording time, Maxtor said. The new QuickView Expander drive will ship this summer to set-top OEMs. The drive will connect to the set-top either via an external SATA connection or via USB-2, Maxtor spokeswoman Karen Clyne said. An IEEE 1394 connection is being investigated, she said. Although storage vendors have yet to widely offer external SATA drives, the cabling standard supporting external SATA was recently approved."

This is excellent news for all of us that own PVRs as we won't have to attempt to mod our current setup in order to get the extra space. And I think this will be especially welcome news for potential HD PVR customers where hard drive space is really one of the limiting factors. It will be available some time this summer though I really wish there was compatibility with different set-top boxes information available. No pricing information either though I suspect it will still get lots o' customers. :)