WDC's "My DVD Expander" and the SA 8300HDC cable box - "allowed but not supported" by TWC-Kansas City - doomed to glitches?

Every 3 or 8 or 10 minutes (almost random, I guess) there is a "glitch" with about a second's worth of sound and picture interruption, looks like the digital stream isn't handled well by the 8300HDC (wins all my awards for the worst PVR box ever). It does run Navigator, which is no improvement over SARA, or at least to me. It features clunky interface operation (try to scroll through something) and no "record only at this time" meaning that on a specific day, when a show is shown at different times, the SA will record it several times.

I just bought the WD "Expander" last week, the box was a little crushed, but I have a feeling good old TWC and their SA box are responsible; if I rewind over the glitch, it will play back fine over the same area.

No way to make this work? Thanks for any advice... Bill

I have the 8300HDC from TWC and I will agree that it's pretty craptastic. Some of my HD channels are just black, never tune in. My 8300HD upstairs is flawless though.
I have an expander on my HDC and while I didn't buy an expander like you did, I just had a spare 160gb HDD laying around and bought an ext enclosure for it.
It pretty much works like a charm. Your STB did format the drive, right?

Yes, on the first powerup, a dialog box came up about formatting the WDC. I said yes and it must have been a "very quick" format, it took only a few seconds. I had a 8300HD when I first moved out here about 3 years ago and it started glitching and doing crazy things in all respects, couldn't even get through the program guide, garbage characters. I had read that the HDC was no good but that's all they had left at TWC.

The box is a true POS. Scrolling through listings - the HDC pauses, buffers IR commands, is slow to respond to the stupid "are you sure?" dialog, and this all gets worse if horror of horrors, both tuners are at work; it's not a good time to try to accomplish anything, it's maxxed out. The 8300HD seemed able to handle anything, wish I could get one again.

I do have a spare 300GB SATA, guess I could try the enclosure route, or if TWC had cable cards that would handle switched video (they seemed to come up with some for the HDC boxes!!!) maybe I'd get another TIVO (had one back in 2000, it was GREAT).