gone

There's a quirk with the software in the 8300 (I'm speaking of Passport specifically, but SARA may have the same drawback - you don't specify in your post which you have; for shame!). Sometimes (maybe all the time) when you erase a program at some point before you reach the end, it doesn't return all that space. If you do it a lot, it adds up.

Tell you what, try this: go to the diagnostic screen AVFS (audio/video file size - it's near the bottom) and write down how much free space you have. Then, do a cold boot on your machine (Turn it off, then unplug it for a few minutes. When you plug it back up, it will boot up cleanly). Then look again at your free space; you should have more. A cold boot usually returns all that "lost" space.

For that reason, I've learned to FF all the way through to the very end (until I get the "erase or save" window) of any program I start watching before erasing it. It's no biggie. You do know that when in FF mode, you can hit the right arrow key and move forward in 15 minute increments, right? (works for reverse, too) You can blow through recorded material pretty quickly that way.

Some of the HDD space is dedicated to the two tuner one hour buffers, each is big enough to hold an hour of full HD bitrate for each tuner, the rest of the HDD space is available for recorded programs.

The two buffers together suck up only about 17 GB of space. The rest of the "missing" space is.... a mystery. But it does seem that some space is not always relinquished when a program is deleted if you don't wait to delete it until you get to the very end. As I said above, a cold boot usually gets that space back for you.

What's even more strange is the missing space on an expansion drive. There are no buffers created on the expansion drive, so you shouldn't have that missing 17 GB. Yet, my 500 GB expansion drive, plus my 160 GB internal drive, only gives me some 600 GB of available space on my second SA8300 DVR, not the 660 one would expect. Take away the 17 GB for the internal drive's buffers, and there's still roughly 43 GB of missing space unaccounted for, even accounting for the fact that the stated capacity of a drive isn't the real capacity because of partitioning, etc.

[QUOTE=archiguy]The two buffers together suck up only about 17 GB of space. The rest of the "missing" space is.... a mystery. But it does seem that some space is not always relinquished when a program is deleted if you don't wait to delete it until you get to the very end. As I said above, a cold boot usually gets that space back for you.

Comparision between the two. Pros & cons.