# Roamio Plus with external drive



## scsmith63 (Jan 12, 2017)

Tried to find this information in one place but it was scattered abroad so I will highlight here. It is possible to use any ESATA drive (note USB is NOT supported) for external storage and not settle for the 1 TB Expander that TIVO supports providing you have the appropriate tools and patience. I was able to purchase the drive for 1/2 the price and 4x the storage of the expander.

I just added a 4 TB external drive from MiniPro which included the ESATA cable and external power supply. This along with the 1 TB internal drive provides 800 HD hours of recording time.

Below I have highlighted the steps I used to configure both drives to work together.


The drive was shipped with support for windows. To convert to TIVO format you have to pull the internal drive and plug this drive (remove from external enclosure) into the internal SATA cable/power connector, power on and wait for ~ 10 minutes for the drive to format automatically. You will know it is complete when you see the initial TIVO setup screen.
Connect the external drive to a Windows machine and run MFSR to provide support for the full 4 TB (usable space about 3.7 TB). Otherwise you will only have 2 TB support.
Connect both drives to a system running MFS 3.2 tools. I created a bootable MFS 3.2 tools CD since I don't have a dedicated Linux machine. I used the USB-C to USB cable for the external drive and a SATA to USB adapter for the internal drive.
Use MFS 3.2 Tools to partition both drives together with this command "mfstool add -xfm 2000 /dev/sdX /dev/sdY" sdX=internal drive sdY=external drive
Reinstall the drives into their appropriate enclosures and power up.
Check the account and system information>system information and note ~800 HD hours recording capacity.


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

scsmith63 said:


> Tried to find this information in one place but it was scattered abroad so I will highlight here. It is possible to use any ESATA drive (note USB is NOT supported) for external storage and not settle for the 1 TB Expander that TIVO supports providing you have the appropriate tools and patience. I was able to purchase the drive for 1/2 the price and 4x the storage of the expander.
> 
> I just added a 4 TB external drive from MiniPro which included the ESATA cable and external power supply. This along with the 1 TB internal drive provides 800 HD hours of recording time.
> 
> ...


Steps 1 and 2 are not necessary to add the external drive to your 1 TB internal drive.


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## scsmith63 (Jan 12, 2017)

jmbach said:


> Steps 1 and 2 are not necessary to add the external drive to your 1 TB internal drive.


Are you 100% certain....have you attempted this yourself? My drive was formatted for windows and if you don't do this how do you get the drive formatted for TIVO? Based on my research this is a requirement and if you don't do step 2 you only are using 2 TB of the drive space.


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## jmbach (Jan 1, 2009)

Yes I have done the procedure for both Roamio and Premiere using MFSTools 3.2. 
If you are concerned about the drive having a Windows format, you can use the manufacturer tools to zero out the first few sectors of the drive.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

scsmith63 said:


> Are you 100% certain....have you attempted this yourself? My drive was formatted for windows and if you don't do this how do you get the drive formatted for TIVO? Based on my research this is a requirement and if you don't do step 2 you only are using 2 TB of the drive space.


Step 2 certainly isn't necessary, although step 1 was necessary to run step 2. What you basically did was to create a 4TB internal drive, which MFSTools 3.2 promptly wiped out and repartitioned in step 4.


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## scsmith63 (Jan 12, 2017)

Since adding the external drive I am seeing external storage not detected at times. Rebooting the TIVO or powering the external storage off/on resolves the issue. In addition, at times recordings will not play back despite having watching them previously. An error about there not being video on the channel shows up and a reboot shows the Green Screen. Any ideas? Rebooted reboots seems to fix the issue...eventually.


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

scsmith63 said:


> Since adding the external drive I am seeing external storage not detected at times. Rebooting the TIVO or powering the external storage off/on resolves the issue. In addition, at times recordings will not play back despite having watching them previously. An error about there not being video on the channel shows up and a reboot shows the Green Screen. Any ideas? Rebooted reboots seems to fix the issue...eventually.


This is one of the reasons NOT to have an external drive and instead have a larger internal drive. Any issues with the drive, external hardware, even the cable and you can lose your shows.

I have a basic Roamio with a 4TB drive and there are no issues coming on 2 years now.


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## scsmith63 (Jan 12, 2017)

jmbach said:


> Yes I have done the procedure for both Roamio and Premiere using MFSTools 3.2.
> If you are concerned about the drive having a Windows format, you can use the manufacturer tools to zero out the first few sectors of the drive.


I am having green screen of death on occasions after installing the external drive...thoughts?


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## ThAbtO (Apr 6, 2000)

scsmith63 said:


> I am having green screen of death on occasions after installing the external drive...thoughts?


There are a number of issues which may cause this condition. From a bad hard drive (either internal or external), the cable connecting them, the external case, etc.


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