# New: WD My Book AV DVR Expander



## oViTynoT (May 18, 2007)

WD Announced yesterday the new "WD My Book AV DVR Expander."

It has both eSATA and USB connectivity options.

$149 MSRP for a 1TB Unit.

TiVo certified.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=16

(Hope ya'll don't mind, but I crossposted to the S3 forum as well.)


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## _Ryan_ (Apr 4, 2010)

oViTynoT said:


> WD Announced yesterday the new "WD My Book AV DVR Expander."
> 
> It has both eSATA and USB connectivity options.
> 
> ...


I saw that too... the enclosure looks a lot slicker than the old ones. Thinking about getting one.

Btw, Amazon has them for $121 at the moment:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003MVZ60S


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## Gregor (Feb 18, 2002)

Thanks for the tip, been looking for one for my XL.


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## rocko (Oct 29, 2002)

FWIW the TiVo website han not been updated to confirm compatablity ...

http://support.tivo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/290/kw/expand/r_id/100041#support


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

Big bummer I just purchased a 1TB My DVR Expander eSata edition a few months back for my S3 - would have liked the My Book AV one better - just in case I wanted to use it for something other than a TiVo at some point (none of my PCs of eSata ports). Plus the My Book AV comes with a 2 year warranty instead of the My DVR Expander's Sh**ty 1 year warranty: http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp?wdc_lang=en

Thanks,


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

Whats even worse is the 1 TB My Book AV is the same price now ($119 including shipping) that I paid for the 1 TB My DVR Expander 2 months ago. 

Double bummer.


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## SNJpage1 (May 25, 2006)

atmuscarella, if you want to use your esata unit with a pc you can get a esata to sata bracket for the back of the case. It has a cable that connects to a sata port on the mother board and gives you an esata port. They cost about $10.


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## atmuscarella (Oct 11, 2005)

SNJpage1 said:


> atmuscarella, if you want to use your esata unit with a pc you can get a esata to sata bracket for the back of the case. It has a cable that connects to a sata port on the mother board and gives you an esata port. They cost about $10.


Thanks for the suggestion, unfortunately the newer computers I have are laptops my PCs are old enough so they don't have sata ports either - I have been thinking I need to upgrade just haven't been willing to spend the bucks yet.


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## oViTynoT (May 18, 2007)

There are also USB to eSATA bridges available. They ain't $10, though...


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## SNJpage1 (May 25, 2006)

If any one is looking for more storage in their desktop I just bought a WD 1 TG from Dell for $69 with free shipping. I am putting it in an external case that has USB and esata. I wish it would work with my TivoHD. Has any one figured out a work around to connect other types of hard drives to a Tivo besides the WD expander?


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## Gregor (Feb 18, 2002)

rocko said:


> FWIW the TiVo website han not been updated to confirm compatablity ...
> 
> http://support.tivo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/290/kw/expand/r_id/100041#support


Got mine yesterday from Amazon and the box says it's Tivo compatible, as does Amazon's website.

Hooked it up and it works fine. The box says "up to 120 hours", but I got around 150 extra hours.


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## cydeweyz (Mar 15, 2010)

How much more power does adding one of these cost, and is it noisy?


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## TrueTurbo (Feb 19, 2008)

Gah, add a WD My Book AV expander at your peril! 

I just went through 2 days of 'expander' hell with a 1TB My Book AV. It worked fine for about 7 days and I added around 50 hours of recordings since I added the hard drive. On Tuesday, I was fitting a new ceiling fan and had to trip the 'lights' breaker in my apartment. That's when I discovered the wall outlets are on my lights circuit in the living room!!

Unfortunately, I didn't have the My Book AV on a UPS like my other equipment is! Stupid oversight. S*#t happens! Anyway, my Premiere XL threw a fit and rebooted. No problem, I thought. I have a 500GB expander on my TiVo HD. I've lost power to it before and the TiVo HD has always recovered without problems once power was back to normal.

Not the case with the My Book AV! It got trashed!! Once power was back to normal, I couldn't get it to work with the Premiere XL properly again! First, it booted up, but the video was choppy, then froze and the Premiere rebooted! This happened a few times, then the green "A serious problem was detected... wait 3 hours... blah, blah, blah..." screen appears! Several more automatic reboots later, I see a screen that says "Cannot detect DVR expander...". Another manual reboot and it says "Wrong expander...". More manual reboots later, I get the Premiere up, then it freezes and reboots!!

After countless more manual reboots ending up with either "Wrong expander..." or "Expander not detected..." screens, I call TiVo support. We go through various troubleshooting tasks and determine the Premiere XL is not the problem. I call WD support and they tell me the My Book AV is scrap!! I have no choice but to divorce it from the Premiere XL. I lost 50+ hours of recordings in the process!!

Now that the My Book AV is gone, my Premiere XL is working perfectly again. As I said, use a WD expander at your peril!


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

TrueTurbo said:


> Gah, add a WD My Book AV expander at your peril!
> 
> I just went through 2 days of 'expander' hell with a 1TB My Book AV. It worked fine for about 7 days and I added around 50 hours of recordings since I added the hard drive. On Tuesday, I was fitting a new ceiling fan and had to trip the 'lights' breaker in my apartment. That's when I discovered the wall outlets are on my lights circuit in the living room!!
> 
> ...


But the moral of this story is to make sure your electronics are on a UPS. If it had been connected to a UPS like it should have been, along with the TiVo, things would have been fine.


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## TrueTurbo (Feb 19, 2008)

aaronwt said:


> But the moral of this story is to make sure your electronics are on a UPS. If it had been connected to a UPS like it should have been, along with the TiVo, things would have been fine.


Possibly, but as I mentioned, I've lost power to a WD 500GB DVR Expander, connected to my TiVo HD, in the past and it didn't crap out on me! I think this 1TB My Book AV Expander was going to crap out on me eventually, with or without a power fail. :down:


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Personally I've always preferred to upgrade the internal drive to get more capacity.


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## TrueTurbo (Feb 19, 2008)

I'm not going to bother with an external drive again until TiVo supports RAID arrays. Striping recordings across 2 disks without parity and the ability to recreate a failed drive is madness!


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## magnum68 (Aug 22, 2004)

atmuscarella said:


> Whats even worse is the 1 TB My Book AV is the same price now ($119 including shipping) that I paid for the 1 TB My DVR Expander 2 months ago.
> 
> Double bummer.


I ordered one today from amazon.com. $119.00 plus $3.99 next day shipping. It will arrive tomorrow. Going to use it on my Tivo Premiere. Let's see if it works well. I'll keep you all posted.


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## magnum68 (Aug 22, 2004)

magnum68 said:


> I ordered one today from amazon.com. $119.00 plus $3.99 next day shipping. It will arrive tomorrow. Going to use it on my Tivo Premiere. Let's see if it works well. I'll keep you all posted.


Got it a little while ago. Set up was a breeze. Now I have a recording capacity of 191 HD hours instead of 46 HD hours. I may just buy another one for my other premiere.


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## DaveWhittle (Jul 25, 2002)

magnum68 said:


> Got it a little while ago. Set up was a breeze. Now I have a recording capacity of 191 HD hours instead of 46 HD hours. I may just buy another one for my other premiere.


Do you loose anything currently on the internal hard drive when setting up the expansion?


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## magnum68 (Aug 22, 2004)

DaveWhittle said:


> Do you loose anything currently on the internal hard drive when setting up the expansion?


Didn't lose anything. All my recordings and downloads from Amazon on demand are there.


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