Between 2001 and 2006, a small community of TiVo enthusiasts invented the modern hard-drive upgrade market. WeaKnees and Hinsdale were the two names every DVR owner learned when their original 40 GB recorder filled up and they realized they could swap in a larger drive for half the cost of a new unit. This page documents that era and explains why the culture it built still shapes how people choose NVR storage today.
Why People Upgraded TiVos
The original TiVo Series 1 shipped in 1999 with a 14-hour hard drive. The entry-level Series 2 unit in 2003 shipped with 40 GB, which held about 40 hours of standard-definition recording at basic quality. Power users filled that in a week. TiVo’s answer was to sell the same hardware with a 180 GB drive pre-installed for $100 extra. The hacker community’s answer was to buy the 40 GB unit, walk to Fry’s Electronics, pick up a 250 GB Maxtor for $99, and swap the drive in thirty minutes.
That swap required two pieces of information: which physical drive the TiVo needed (3.5-inch IDE, 5400 or 7200 RPM, quiet-operation preferred) and which software tool to clone the existing TiVo filesystem onto the new drive. That is where Hinsdale and WeaKnees came in.
The Hinsdale How-To
Steve Cook, a software engineer in Hinsdale, Illinois, published the definitive TiVo hard-drive upgrade how-to in 2001 and kept it updated through 2007. The guide, simply titled "Hinsdale How-To," was hosted on a personal page that received an estimated two million unique visits across its run. It walked a non-technical reader through booting a TiVo bootdisc on a Linux PC, running the mfstool or mfsbackup utility, and cloning the filesystem from the original 40 GB drive onto a larger replacement in under thirty minutes.
The guide’s cultural contribution was documenting the correct mfstool command-line flags to enable the second IDE channel on Series 2 units, which supported dual-drive configurations. A TiVo with a primary 250 GB drive and a secondary 500 GB drive held almost 700 hours of standard-definition recording. For the 2003 entertainment household that kept six months of recorded shows on a single box, this was transformative.
WeaKnees and the Twinbreeze Kit
WeaKnees was founded in 2003 by two TiVo enthusiasts in Los Angeles. The business started as a reseller of pre-imaged TiVo replacement drives: you bought a 250 GB drive pre-loaded with the correct TiVo filesystem, swapped it into your unit in fifteen minutes, and skipped the Linux command-line portion of the Hinsdale guide entirely. WeaKnees added a second product that became iconic: the Twinbreeze cooling kit.
The Twinbreeze addressed a real hardware problem. Series 2 TiVos were designed for a single drive. Adding a second drive required mounting it in the space above the original and, critically, improving airflow so neither drive ran hot enough to fail. The Twinbreeze was a mounting bracket plus a twin-fan cooler sized for the TiVo chassis. We reviewed it in July 2003 and our review is referenced in dozens of WayBack Machine snapshots of hacker forum posts from 2003-2007.
WeaKnees also sold DirecTiVo upgrade drives (the satellite-integrated TiVos marketed by DirecTV), cache cards (for Series 1 units needing more memory to handle the 9.0 software update), and eventually shifted into retail selling of TiVo-branded hardware as the DIY upgrade era declined. The company remains in business in 2026 as a specialist TiVo retailer and refurbishing service.
The Cultural Contribution
What Hinsdale and WeaKnees proved was that consumer DVR owners would open a sealed hardware box if the payoff was measurable. A 40-hour TiVo becoming a 700-hour TiVo for $99 was measurable. The hacker community’s workflow was replicated on the Xbox (mod chips, larger drives), the Windows Media Center (swap a PC hard drive), and later on the TiVo Series 3 with dual-drive expansion.
The surveillance category inherited this DNA directly. Modern security DVRs from Lorex, Amcrest, and Dahua all ship with user-accessible HDD bays and documented procedures for swapping drives. It is unusual now to see a DVR or NVR that forbids user storage upgrades, because the Hinsdale-era expectation survives: if it holds my recordings, I should be allowed to pick the drive.
Compare to modern phone hardware, where swapping a battery now voids the warranty and requires a manufacturer service visit. The TiVo ecosystem demonstrated a model where user hardware access is a feature, not a security hole. The surveillance industry followed.
What Remains Today
WeaKnees still ships TiVo upgrade drives in 2026, although the volume has collapsed as the overall TiVo subscriber base has. The Hinsdale guide is preserved on multiple mirror sites including the Wayback Machine. The mfstools source code is on GitHub. Enthusiasts upgrading a vintage Series 2 TiVo in 2026 follow a workflow that is nearly identical to the 2003 version.
More importantly, every modern NVR product review page measures ease of HDD swapping as a primary purchase consideration. That is directly downstream of Hinsdale and WeaKnees educating a generation of DVR buyers that upgrading your own storage is a right, not a violation.