TW SA 8000 Program Storage Capacity

[ryanne]

I'm having problems getting my Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 DVR cable box to record as many hours as advertised.

The Scientific Atlanta site says it will hold up to 50 hours but Time Warner drops that to 30. I have 2 8000 boxes and one of them will only hold around 14 hours. The other will hold up to 27.

Time Warner says that the way these boxes alocate memory is:

Total Storage = Saved programs PLUS Scheduled Programs.

This is crazy! Any child could tell them that we delete most programs after viewing them so that you don't need to count the future schedule in the total storage capacity.

Does anyone else have this problem?

Does anyone know how the physical memory is configured? I was thinking that if the total storage was spread over more than 1 hardware device (for example, could the 8000 have 2 HDs?) then my storage problem could be due to one of the HDs failing.

Personally, I think that TW is telling the customer support staff to tell us something believable, but wrong, so they can save money on replacing the 8000s.

ryanne

 

[terryfoster]

Keep in mind that it's also 50 hours of digital video as opposed to recording analog channels which take up more space. Do you know how much of your recorded programing is digital vs. analog?

 

[nateman99]

Additionally, do you know if you market has been converted to digital simulcast? If so, you should be seeing much better storage capacity than you are reporting. When we converted over, I was able to store nearly a third more programs.