How much space do you need in a new TiVo?

With the hard - crusade capacities of personal video recorders swell up beyond 100 gigabyte , Matt Haughey of PVRblog ( which is an excellent unexampled blog , by the way of life ) asks a good question : “ How much space do I require in a fresh TiVo ? ”

Say you had a 30 - 40 hr maximal Tivo and you observe maybe two hour 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 could see ( especially as it take hold of shows it opine you might wish ) , so there will be a estimable 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 room for new shows . If you have clock time to sit down and watch recorded video every couple day , a smaller tivo drive will crop all right . If , on the other mitt , you only regain prison term on weekend to watch the previous week ’s TV you will run into problems . problem take the form of thing like being furious that last calendar week ’s Six Feet Under was blue-pencil before you ever get to see it , and the repeats of it were n’t taped because TiVo already had a written matter of it ( which was finally deleted ) .

Here at Gizmodo HQ we have one of the very first models that came out , a Series 1 TiVo with a scant 14 minute of recording time . Though we would n’t take care having more , we rarely have time to find out all of the shows we ’re record anyway , so upgrading just to make it possible to record yet more show has n’t been much of an issue .