"I definitely want 750 gigs of space, so the question for me is if it's worth an extra $200 bucks for someone else to image the drive and figure out a solution to the proprietary drive connector"
If the Series 3 is anything like the Series 2, then no, it's not worth it.
Imaging the drive is a trivial process if you're at all tech savvy. It takes about 10 minutes and just involves running a Linux boot CD on your PC with your old TiVo drive and your new drive connected to it. I wouldn't say it's something my grandma could do, but for anyone with any knowledge of computers at all, it's nothing. If you can connect a hard drive to your PC, then you can do it.
I don't know if the Series 3 really has a "proprietary" drive connector inside or not. The Series 2 just had a regular old IDE connector. If the Series 3 has a vanilla SATA connector, then you're good to go once you've imaged. Otherwise, it still doesn't seem worth it to pay $200 for a proprietary connector. Just get the connector from somewhere. It can't be more than $20 worth of electronics.
People were selling these "upgrade kits" for Series 2 machines also, for inflated prices. I just went out and bought a big hard drive and downloaded MFSTools. It was easy.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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"I definitely want 750 gigs of space, so the question for me is if it's worth an extra $200 bucks for someone else to image the drive and figure out a solution to the proprietary drive connector"
If the Series 3 is anything like the Series 2, then no, it's not worth it.
Imaging the drive is a trivial process if you're at all tech savvy. It takes about 10 minutes and just involves running a Linux boot CD on your PC with your old TiVo drive and your new drive connected to it. I wouldn't say it's something my grandma could do, but for anyone with any knowledge of computers at all, it's nothing. If you can connect a hard drive to your PC, then you can do it.
I don't know if the Series 3 really has a "proprietary" drive connector inside or not. The Series 2 just had a regular old IDE connector. If the Series 3 has a vanilla SATA connector, then you're good to go once you've imaged. Otherwise, it still doesn't seem worth it to pay $200 for a proprietary connector. Just get the connector from somewhere. It can't be more than $20 worth of electronics.
People were selling these "upgrade kits" for Series 2 machines also, for inflated prices. I just went out and bought a big hard drive and downloaded MFSTools. It was easy.