This is a sweet kit from weaknees.com. It lets you pimp out your Tivo with a second hard drive.

It comes with a new drive mount that accommodates 2 IDE drives, M/S IDE ribbon cable, extra fan, PowerTrip, and power splitter. Not bad for $33.00. All you need is an extra hard drive.

To complete the upgrade, you’ll need a Linux MFS Tools Boot CD and a PC with 2 IDE channels and an optical drive. I had to use my computer at work because there are no PCs in this house. Follow to HOW TO link on the MFS page for some really in-depth user-friendly instructions on all the commands you’ll need for all the various upgrade combinations once your in the Linux environment.

Here’s how easy it was:

1)    I created a MFS Tools Boot CD.

2)    I prepped the 2nd drive: I formatted a spare 120G Maxtor drive on my Mac with 1

       primary FAT32 partition.

3)    I cracked open the Tivo and pulled out the hard drive.

4)    I brought both drives to work and installed them in my PC.

       (C drive: P Master, 120G: P Slave, Tivo drive: S Master, CDROM: S Slave)

5)    I booted up the PC with the MFS Tools Boot CD.

6)    Once at the command prompt, I issued the “mfsadd -r 4 -x  /dev/hdc  /dev/hdb ” command

       to make the Tivo drive aware of the 120G drive. One line, it’s that easy!

7)    I shutdown and removed the drives.

8)    I brought the drives home and installed them in the Tivo as follows:

9)    I attached the extra fan and drives to new bracket.

10)   I attached the power cables, splitter, and PowerTrip. (PowerTrip delays the startup of

        the second drive by 7 seconds. This way the Tivo power supply doesn’t get blasted

        when both drives try to spin up simultaneously.)

11)    I installed the bracket into the Tivo and connected the IDE and power cables.

12)    I closed up the Tivo, reconnected to the TV, and powered it up.

13)    I verified the new capacity.

I went from 40 hrs at “Basic” quality to 182 hours! That’s a sweet boost! However, I always record at “High”. I was still pleased to see that I had gone from 13 hours to 83! That’s an extra 70 hours of recording time!