A few years ago when the prices for hard drive digital recorders dropped I bought one for a stunning $199 at Radio Shack. It was this moment that ended my reign as The King of Video Tapes. The DVR was an Accurian ADR-3223 with a 80gb hard drive and a DVD burner so you can save what you recorded onto DVDs. $199 was a bargain for a DVR, let alone one that could burn from it’s HD to DVD; a comparably capable unit would set you back well over $400 back then. The best thing about a DVR that has a built-in DVD burner is that you can record your favorite shows and copy them to DVDs; there’s no need to buy TV shows on DVD anymore! And with a unit like mine, you can edit out the commercials too! Suck on that, TiVo!

My Accurian has served me well over the years but as time went on I found the 80gb hard drive, which gave me about 34hrs of recording time, to be more and more limiting. So it finally became time to set about upgrading the Accurian to a larger hard drive. Like a good geek, I had plenty of them lying around and it was time to give some new life to my dear, old friend.

After looking through various threads on the Net for help, it became readily apparent that not only had others added larger hard drives to the unit, but my Accurian ADR-3223 was actually a rebadged Liteon 5045 with a smaller hard drive; quite similiar to a Liteon HD04 DVR as well… and the best part is the upgrade instructions for any of these devices is supposed to work on my Accurian!

So armed with enough knowledge to be completely dangerous and a phillips screwdriver I did what any eager geek would do.

After I finished watching the Matrix again, I opened the cover of my DVR and was startled at what I saw. Wow, this is going to be so freaking easy.

All there was to the DVR was a circuit board, a power supply, a typical DVD burner and an IDE hard drive! I removed the unit’s 80gb hard drive and took it to my computer where I copied the entire contents. This way, I backed up all the shows I had saved on it, in case something went wrong. Some geeks are too lazy to make backups but in this case, I wasn’t prepared to lose all that crappy television I didn’t see yet…

To prepare the new, larger hard drive you have to format it to FAT32 w/ a 64k cluster size. I used the fat32format program that was recommended with the following command in a DOS window: fat32format -c128 f: (replace f with the letter of the drive to be prepared).

After the drive was successfully formatted, I copied all the files I had backed up from the original drive to the new one. This way, if it worked all my saved TV shows would be there, as well as a ton more recording space waiting to be filled up with sci-fi programming!

I then flipped the hard drive upside down, because that’s the way the original one was and the IDE cable was too short not to and put my Accurian 3223 back together. I then connected it to my TV, crossed fingers powered the puppy up, prayed and punched the ON button. (The ON button later sued and the case is still pending.)

After the DVR booted up, I went to the Browser screen and saw all the programs that I had recorded show up! I played a few to check them out and YAY! they played just fine. I had successfully upgraded to a bigger hard drive and saved what I had already recorded!

Now for the big question, did it see all of the new 320gb drive like it should? How much more than 34hrs of recording time would I have now? I hit the TIMER button and prayed even harder…101 hours 42 minutes of recording space left! Wowzers! I went from 34 hours of recording time to a total of 135 hours!!

Thanks to the new hard drive, I can now record an entire season’s worth of 4 different TV series and still have the original 34 hours recording time left on the sucker to record other stuff. Hot dagnabbit, I think I’m in love all over again with my upgraded DVR!

Now if you’ll excuse me, we’d like to be alone for a while…