Anyone been successful in adding hard drive space to the Motorola DCH 3416?

I added an external drive to the box via USB and it detected the drive, but failed to write any material to the drive once the internal drive was full.

I also swapped out the 160 gig drive for a 250 gig and the damn firmware formatted the drive as a 160 gig and ignored the rest. Wonder if there is a way with Ghost or a MOT firmware change to get a bigger drive in these things... really frustrating that you can only put 20 hours of HD recording in these things.

Anyone been successful in adding hard drive space to the Motorola DCH 3416?

No. Its USB port isn't active (it supplies power, but nothing else), nor is the eSATA port. Replacing the internal hard drive won't buy you anything either, since the firmware is hard-coded to a limit of 160 GB. (You can put in a much larger drive, but it'll still only use 160 GB, no matter what.)

Motorola has said that they're working on external storage support via eSATA, but it's been awhile since they've said anything new about when that'll materialize. It could be awhile. Supposedly the blocker was encryption, but given that third-party DVRs like the HD TiVos have a compliant encrypted-storage implementation, you wouldn't think Motorola of all people would have a problem, since they don't even have to worry about CableCARD license regs. But who can know?

A tech for Cox cable told me over the phone today to just plug in a eSATA drive and I will get more space. He couldn't give me any details though because it's "not supported". Anyone try this since the last update (Cox Orange County)? If it does work, does it delete any shows currently on the HDD?

I don't want to buy a drive if it won't work, but would love the extra space.

The esata ports arent active and probably never will. Motorola and comcast and the other cable providers dont have to activate them cause the only competition is a tivo. They more or less say if you dont like it go get a tivo. They do not care.