I’ve recently upgraded my Comcast DVR’s storage space (Scientific Atlanta 8300HD) and after reading several articles, I thought I’d share with you how to do it. It seems that others are having problems with the steps involved.

  1. Buy an external hard drive or an internal hard drive and an external hard drive enclosure (I chose the internal hard drive and external enclosure since there are more options). Hardware I chose: Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB HDD; Eagle eSATA/USB2 external enclosure
  2. Make sure the drive is not formatted NTFS because this will not allow your DVR to use it and you will get errors. I’ve read that you can have it formatted Fat32 and it will work. However, I just hooked it up to a computer and used a Disk Manager (built into any operating system) to delete the partition on the hard drive and leave it as unallocated space.
  3. Unplug your DVR
  4. Plug your external drive into a power outlet and hook the eSATA cable into the eSATA port on the back of the DVR
  5. Wait about 15 seconds to make sure the drive is fully powered up
  6. Plug the DVR’s power cable back in.
  7. Press the “Power” button on the DVR.
  8. Let the DVR go through it’s initialization process. At some point during this process it will inform you that there is an external drive attached and ask you to press the yellow “A” key to continue and format the drive.
  9. Watch TV for about 5 minutes (to be safe) while the drive formats. It will not tell you when it is done, and the space will not show up immediately. After 5 minutes turn the power off to the DVR.
  10. Now you will need to reboot the DVR again. You should be able to just unplug the DVR as you did to begin with. I, however, chose to do the button combination for resetting. If you want to do it my way then you need to press the “Info”, “Volume -”, and “Volume +” buttons on the front of the DVR simultaneously. This should do a soft reset.
  11. The DVR will go through it’s initialization process again, except this time after it boots up, go to your recorded program list. From there you should be able to hit the blue “B” button to go to preferences where it will tell you your available space. If done right you will see something like mine below.

    12. My Comcast DVR after adding an external eSATA hard drive (used space for my recorded programs changed from 43% to 3% thus increasing my available storage by 13 1/3 times the original available space):

    I’ve read reports that Time Warner has prevented the use of external storage by disabling the USB2 and eSATA ports on the DVRs in some regions of the country. The reports say that when asked Time Warner technicians say those ports are used strictly for “diagnostics”. Since I have only done this to my own DVR, I obviously cannot guarantee it will work for your DVR. The best way to check this would probably be to borrow someone’s external drive that is formatted NTFS or Fat32. When you plug that into your DVR, if you get any message regarding “External Storage” (either asking to format {Fat32} or saying you can’t use it {NTFS})then the ports are obviously active. If you borrowed the drive, make sure you don’t format and erase your friend’s data. From this point, just follow my steps. If you have any questions simply reply to this topic in the forums.