Recording onto a hard drive - what size is needed

cazs

I have a Sony Bravia kdl46ex524 which allows you to record via a USB hard drive.
The i-Manual says that it can support between 32 GB and 2 TB.
Can anyone indicate how many hours of recording would be supported for each size of HDD?
For example, would one of 32GB allow one hour of recording, or two or ten etc? 500GB would give ten hours, 20 hours etc?
Can anyone give an indication please?

Fifer

Roughly speaking, an hour of standard definition TV requires about 2GB and an hour of HD programming uses around 7GB.

macman

The most basic Freeview PVR's now come with 320GB of disk space, so you'd be advised to use a drive of no less than 500GB, and preferably 1TB.

Ectophile

macman wrote: »

The most basic Freeview PVR's now come with 320GB of disk space, so you'd be advised to use a drive of no less than 500GB, and preferably 1TB.

That depends on whether or not you're planning to record a lot of HD. If not, you will end up recording more than you will ever have time to watch.

At 2GB/hour, a 500GB disk will record over 10 days of TV. Would anybody ever find time to watch all that lot?

Nilrem

Ectophile wrote: »

That depends on whether or not you're planning to record a lot of HD. If not, you will end up recording more than you will ever have time to watch.

At 2GB/hour, a 500GB disk will record over 10 days of TV. Would anybody ever find time to watch all that lot?

That possibly depends on how you watch stuff
I tend to record some stuff until the entire series is on the PVR then watch it in large chunks/over consecutive days (usually about 4-6 series) which can take up a lot of stuff (I'm not watching more or less than if I watched them as aired, just in blocks).

A habit I picked up in part because it's how I like to watch DVD's etc, and means I'm not at the mercy of the schedules.

It's always worth over speccing on storage if the cost is reasonable, as you almost always find you'll want more (either because there is a lot in a short space of time, or because you end up being too busy for a while).