# TiVo BOLT VOX usb drive support?



## Yamboo31 (Nov 23, 2016)

Does anybody know if the Tivo Bolt VOX Supports a usb 3.0 4TB drive? Thanks


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## dianebrat (Jul 6, 2002)

Officially? nope, no Bolt does.
Unofficially the Bolt VOX has the same support and limitations as all the other Bolts do.


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## ej42137 (Feb 16, 2014)

To expand Diane's answer, no TiVo supports any USB drive. The only external drives supported by TiVo are a few specific eSATA 1 TB or 500 GB obsolete drives that you won't be able to find and wouldn't want if you could. (There was sort of an exception for the Series 3 but even there the "support" wasn't official.)

There is a third-party vendor (Weaknees) who can make external eSATA drives connect to a TiVo. If you feel the need for more than 3 TB of storage that is who you should be talking to.


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## Yamboo31 (Nov 23, 2016)

My guess is Tivo will never "Officially" Support any kind of USB drive, so that they can sell you the more expensive junk with the bigger drives. the reason i ask, is I already have a 4TB Western Digital usb drive i bought from walmart earlier this year. was thinking of buying a newer bolt vox, but now i don't see any advantages.


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## ej42137 (Feb 16, 2014)

I doubt TiVo will ever do anything with external drives again. Back in the Series 3 days they experimented with eSATA and your TiVo would format just about anything that was attached. Then one of two things happened:
a) TiVo realized they were leaving money on the table by not controlling this market, or
b) Many customers had difficulties with substandard external drives and TiVo decided to only allow drives that passed muster to be used and protect their customers from having a bad experience.​In any case, the next half generation of the TiVo HD (which was confusedly also called a Series 3) would only accept drives that were in its "whitelist" of a few blessed drives that TiVo had for sale and would refuse anything else.

Customers reported lots of problems here on TCF, because external drives are notoriously unreliable. Because of the way recordings were made scattered onto both the external and internal drives, losing the external drive usually meant one would lose everything. TiVo continues to "support" the external drives in their whitelist, but they've never added to it and seem to have decided to let the whole thing die of neglect. The few drives that worked have become almost impossible to find, and since the TiVos internal disks have become larger over the years, their utility has become marginal.

Weaknees will nowadays sell you a paired combination of a 3 TB internal and 10 TB external drives. I think the risk incurred by having an external drive is pointless unless you get a significant payback by going for broke with maximum storage.


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

Installing your own drive internally is almost trivial. I would suggest the OP invested that pathway. There are many threads on it, and YouTube instructions.


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## Yamboo31 (Nov 23, 2016)

ej42137 said:


> To expand Diane's answer, no TiVo supports any USB drive. The only external drives supported by TiVo are a few specific eSATA 1 TB or 500 GB obsolete drives that you won't be able to find and wouldn't want if you could. (There was sort of an exception for the Series 3 but even there the "support" wasn't official.)
> 
> There is a third-party vendor (Weaknees) who can make external eSATA drives connect to a TiVo. If you feel the need for more than 3 TB of storage that is who you should be talking to.


so i cant connect a esata to usb cable to a external usb drive, and that should work?


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## dianebrat (Jul 6, 2002)

Yamboo31 said:


> so i cant connect a esata to usb cable to a external usb drive, and that should work?


Only the drives in WD tivo expander external eSATA 500GB and 1TB products have the drive firmware that a Tivo will accept for use as an external solution, no other drives are on the accepted list.
Summary, what you want to do won't work, because Tivo external drive protocols are not what you're assuming.


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## PSU_Sudzi (Jun 4, 2015)

Yamboo31 said:


> so i cant connect a esata to usb cable to a external usb drive, and that should work?


Not to be smart but didn't you read anything anyone posted in response?


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## shwru980r (Jun 22, 2008)

Yamboo31 said:


> Does anybody know if the Tivo Bolt VOX Supports a usb 3.0 4TB drive? Thanks


If you buy an External USB drive that has a SATA drive inside, you could run a long SATA cable from the Bolt motherboard to the SATA connection of the hard drive inside the external case. This would allow you to use a 3.5" drive with the Bolt, but you would not be able to pair it with the internal drive inside the bolt.


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## ej42137 (Feb 16, 2014)

Yamboo31 said:


> so i cant connect a esata to usb cable to a external usb drive, and that should work?


No.

Nothing you try will work. If it did work, the risks would overshadow the benefits, but lucky for you, nothing you will try will ever connect an external HD to your TiVo. To be clear, it won't work. Oh, and by the way, what you want to do is not possible for you to accomplish.

No.


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## Yamboo31 (Nov 23, 2016)

so esata is like usb? it detects what it plugged into it?


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

Yamboo31 said:


> so esata is like usb? it detects what it plugged into it?


Yes. Even with the approved TiVo expanders (no longer made) you couldn't swap out the drive because because the 'whitelist' only contains about a dozen drives listed by model number and firmware.


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