I have a TiVo HR10-250 for my DirecTV setup; have had it for a couple of years and have loved it.  Our family started running out of space on the DVR last October and I had the chance to consider my options: To upgrade the existing box or get a new one?

Bottom line: I upgraded and added another drive but not without regrets.

No secret that TiVo and DirecTV are parting ways, despite the announcement that they will continue to work to support the existing DirecTiVos through 2009, the combination of a switch to MPEG-4 compression (used to be only MPEG-2) and the work TiVo is doing with Comcast spells doom for those of us who own DirecTiVos.  So knowing impending doom, what to do?

• Switch to cable? Comcast is my local provider and right about the time I started considering this the San Jose Murky News published a story about how many complaints there are about the Motorola DVRs which Comcast provides.  Recently confirmed by experience of a close friend - so that was out.  My DirecTiVo had been working flawlessly for a couple of years.
  
  
• Leave well enough alone - should have done that but my instinct to tinker got the better of me.  So we'd lose a couple of shows we wanted to keep, big deal, get over it.  Hindsight is 20/20: What was I thinking?
  
  
• Hack the TiVo and hook it up to the ample disk space on my home network.  First objection was that hacking was not for the faint of heart.  The boxes run on Linux so completely doable and getting better every day BUT as one forum put it "it's high pressure hacking" - mess up and you're taking things apart and hoping you can get back to the original.  Second objection, hooking it up to the network doesn't necessarily get you and advantage in space (although you do get some cool navigating and programming features).  After reading several forums for a while I decided I wasn't that skilled and moved on.
  
  
• Work with DirecTV to get a new HR20-700, the newest, coolest box that doesn't include TiVo and DirecTV's replacement for the doomed relationship.  I looked through those forums for a bit and found enthusiastic techies working away at dealing with the bugs in the machines, many of them making reference to the HR10-250 and "the one that worked".  Interesting, though, that people like the new box, it just doesn't work, the news made it to PC Magazine.  Again, not for me, I clearly had the ideal, mature, working machine - don't mess with it!
  
  
• Expand capacity in the current box.  Companies like WeaKnees (pronounced "Weak Knees" not "Weenies" as I first thought) offer upgrades to TiVo boxes of all kinds and have many testimonials on their site.  This did involve opening the TiVo and messing around with the hardware but the instructions were so easy (available online) that I thought this was well within my skills and I plunked down my $225 for a expansion kit that included a 300GB Seagate drive and an additional cooling fan.

Installation was everything they promised.  Simple, very clear instructions and a little intimidating because of the warnings.  Nonetheless it went flawlessly and I was up and running with my 550GB DirecTiVo within the hour.  I was thrilled with the wisdom of my decision. 

But a week later funny things started to happen very slowly:  At first the system just rebooted spontaneously.  Two weeks later, it did it again.  A couple of months after installation it was rebooting every day at least once, sometimes twice.  When it tried to come back up it got stuck on the "Powering up" screen or on the "Just a Few Minutes More" screen.  The fateful final day was when it rebooted every 10 minutes a few times in a row and then nothing.  Back to Weaknees who was incredibly responsive.  Diagnosed the problem (bad drive/bad data), asked me to send both drives and they took care of it.  Unfortunately their solution was to check the disks, presumable with some SMART  tools and some sophisticated proprietary tools and, since both disks passed, to reformat both, reload the OS and send them back - without programs.  So much for saving my TV. 

I have to say that Weaknees was very quick to take the drive back and they didn't charge me for diagnostic despite the fact that nothing failed.  Even the second time, a month later.  Yes it failed again - same symptoms.  After detailed discussion with Weaknees (again quick to respond) we decided to dump the Western Digital drive (the original one) and stick with the brand new Seagate.  That's what I have now, so in the end I "upgraded" about 11 more hours of HD programming capacity but I lost everything I wanted to save.  And I still don't really know what the problem was - the current brand new drive is working fine in the first two days since the latest cleanup but it's making a lot of noise - not a good sign. 

So if I had to do it all over again, clearly I would have left well enough alone and waited for the new HD boxes from DirecTV and/or from Motorola for Comcast to mature.  It was fun having 70 Hours of HD recording capacity for a few weeks but clearly not worth the pain. 

Update 2 weeks later: Still working - somewhat to my surprise.  Drive is still making an awful noise but no issues yet and the HD content has been on an off quite a bit now.  It took a month to fail last time so the jury is still out, but hope is springing.

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