We have DirecTV’s HD DVR service at home but we were beginning to outgrow the stock 320GB drive in our HR21-700 receiver as it is chronically under 10% free capacity. I decided to pick up a Western Digital 1TB Green drive (model WD10EADS) to replace it.

This forum post on DBSTalk.com contains a pretty detailed walk though with photos detailing the removal procedure. Although the photos are of a slightly earlier version of the HR2* series receivers, the steps are pretty much the same.

You can simply swap the drives without copying your existing shows to the new drive, but I decided to copy over my old shows. The directions posted on using GParted worked like a charm. Be prepared for the data to copy from drive to drive though…it took about 2 hours and 15 minutes for me.