This morning Philips presented Howard Stern with a 72 hour TiVo prototype as thanks for his ceaseless and unpaid praise of the innovative video recording product.

Hopefully we'll see it in stores soon, along with reduced prices on the 14 and 30 hour models.

Richard Bullwinkle (Howard's guest and TiVo webmaster) just said there are no current plans to make such a monster...at least not for "a long time".

What's involved? A bigger hard drive. Not that much of a deal for manufacturing really -- but what size hard drive did that have?

Since the 30 hour unit I have has a 27 gig, I'd guess the 72 hour is somewhare in the 60 or 70 gig range. Probably pretty easy to find out by seeing what size Quantum makes in the size range, since they provide the drives for TiVo. By the way, for those of you with a 15 hour TiVo - TiVo now is offering an upgrade from 15 to 30 hours for $299 on their web site. Just send in your TiVo and they send it back with a bigger drive.

Must be a prototype drive, since the largest IDE drive on Quantum's site is... 30gb? Biggest IDE drive I've seen period is a 40gb Maxtor.

TiVo can (and does) use more than one hard drive in a single unit.

The idea of increasing storage capacity by using multiple hard drives is pretty smart and shows TiVo's flexibility in design to meet user demands. The update from 15 to 30 hours for $299 also indicates TiVo's commitment to enhancing user experience. I wonder how the inclusion of multiple hard drives impacts the system's overall performance and reliability. Have there been any notable changes in how digital video recorders are designed since then to accommodate larger storage needs?