Never Erase Again!

Implications: *Western Digital introduced a 500 GB DVR expander product to add storage capacity to a digital video recorder with an external storage device  * Western digital plans to offer a 1 TB version of this product this year  * WD joins Seagate/Maxtor and others with external storage products to expand the storage capacity of DVRs and set top boxes  * These devices use the external serial ATA interface for a high speed external connection Keeping and organizing digital content is a growing challenge for consumers

Analysis: Set top boxes for cable systems more often than not now include digital video recording capability.  In addition companies such as TiVo make stand alone digital video recorders.  These devices are built to last for many years and only ship with enough digital storage capacity to hold tens of hours of programming.  Even the largest drives shipping in DVR products can only hold a few tens of hours of HDTV programming.  These products easily can fill up with recorded programming requiring the user to erase older material to make room for newer material.  During the years that these products are in use in a home hard disk drive technology continues to evolve, making higher capacity 3.5-inch hard disk drives available that can be used to record more programming.  Today you can buy a 1 TB HDD, but in 2 years 3 TB or higher drives should be available.  Replacing the HDD in a DVR is not something most users want to do and set top box manufacturers don’t encourage users to open their boxes.  Without some path to storage expansion users are stuck with limited program recording capacity.

Maxtor pioneered in the development of external expansion storage devices for digital video recorders and today Seagate, who acquired Maxtor produces these products.  Western Digital recently announced that they too are producing DVR expander products.  These products use an external SATA or eSATA interface with data rates of 3 gigabits per second to transfer data to and from the external drive to the DVR.  Most new DVRs are built with external SATA interfaces on their rear allowing these devices to be plugged in and providing expandable storage capacity for an older DVR.  With port multiplier technology multiple eSATA interface external storage boxes can be attached to a DVR allowing significant expansion of programming recording capacity over time.  Within a couple of years with 6 Gbps SATA and likely eSATA these external devices will provide very fast content transfer of many video streams at one time.

Cable operators and other service providers that buy set top boxes with DVR capability will benefit from external expansion storage devices in they can provide their customers with the minimal disk drive capacity within the set top box.  If customers need more storage they can just buy an external eSATA interface box and connect it to their DVR.  This reduces the cost of buying and implementing DVRs in the field.  This approach combined with the continued capacity growth of hard disk drives could result in  160 GB internal DVR drives with as much as 10 TB on external storage by 2014 according to Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics, Thomas Coughlin, Newnes Press, March 2008.

Capturing content on an external drive connected to a DVR provides temporary help to consumers that want to keep more content than they can hold on the internal drive but it doesn’t solve a larger problem in the home.  As we accumulate more personal and commercial content in the home; organizing, indexing and protecting this content becomes more crucial.  Moving into the second decade of the 21st century will require significant developments to make an integrated home storage utility a reality.