J has been using our Cox DVR to record lots of Olympics stuff and has been having issues with her normal shows having to be erased to make room. So I thought I would surprise her and add more storage to it.

It's a Scientific Atlanta (now Cisco) Explorer 8300HD. It comes with 2 tuners, a 160 GB drive and has an ESATA port. There are few if any reports of 2 TB or larger drives working with this box, but lots of reports of 1 TB drives working.

I generally followed these instructions - http://www.nachbar.n...300-dvr-from-cox/

I got a WD 1TB black drive - http://www.amazon.co...oduct/B0036Q7MV0/
A Vantec NexStar CX external enclosure - http://www.amazon.co...oduct/B001TQ2PSO/ It came with an ESATA cable, but I got a 1 m cable from CablestoGo for safety sake.

The installation was trivial. The drive can rattle around a little in the enclosure, so I used a thin piece of the white packing foam from the case box under the case to minimize that.

Unplugged the cable box, plugged in the drive power and the ESATA cable at both ends. Turned on the hard drive (HD) to make sure it was working and happy, plugged in the DVR cable box and let it boot up. When the clock came on, I turned the HD off and waited about 15 seconds. I then turned the HD on and then the cable box popped up a message on the TV saying the external drive had been disconnected. I hit the A key on the remote to dismiss the popup and then saw another popup that the drive needed to be formatted. Hit A to have it format, hit A again to confirm, and it started formatting the drive.

It went from 32% free to 91% free. Woot. (To see the available space, at least with the Passport software - hit the DVR List button on the remote, A for Saved Shows, scroll down 1 click to View Disk info... then hit Select. C to return then Exit to go back to watching TV.)

So far, so good. The drive light (a bright blue LED) is flashing intermittently now; maybe it's continuing the formatting in the background or something (no recordings are active) and there's no obvious way to know what it's doing in the background.

Cheers,
Scott.