I've been using my 320Gb Humax HDR a bit more recently and the hard drive is pretty full now.

Does anyone have any experiences recording to an external drive via the USB on the back?

If so, what drives work best. Anyone any ideas?

Apologies if this has been posted before.

By far your best solution is to replace the internal HDD, its a very simple solution if you use a 1TB drive and can cost as little as £40.

You can't record directly to usb. You have to record first then transfer recordings to usb. For files larger than 4GB (HD or very long SD Movies) the drive needs to be formatted EXT3

That's the answer then, I've bought a caddy to put an old Hard Drive in and I'm going to transfer some of the older stuff on to it to make room for new on the main drive.

I will upgrade the Hard Drive at some point (I have in both my Sky HD boxes but the HDD on the Humax is 82% full at the mo so need to watch/archive plenty first.

I presume although I cant record to the external drive, I will be able to play directly from it? Or will I have to move the stuff back on to the main drive first?

Sorry for asking but I've had the box about two years and hardly used it but it's getting a lot of use now as I've cut down my Sky to bare minimum (+movies!!) recently so I only have the one box now with Sky Plus.

Cheers all.

You can replay directly from a usb device. Press media/red and change the target to the usb drive (usb 1 if you only have 1 connected)

I now have a problem reformatting my caddy/hard drive drive in to FAT32. It seems that 250Gb is too big!! How do I get round that one??

It's purely a microsoft windows restriction. There are loads of ways, this is the first of loads of hits on Google

http://fat32-formatter.softwareandgames.com/