What external hard drive to use with the Sony KDL-40ex653?

[pjgraham]

Hi, I have a Sony KDL-40ex653 and want to use the record function but obviously need an external hard disc drive, I have been looking around the forums for help me decide which one is best but from what i can see 50% say any hard drive will do and 50% say it has to be fat32 or it wont work, so i would like to know which hard drives are compatible (was thinking just 500MB) and if they did need to be formatted wouldn't the TV do this?

I would be grateful for any help or advice as I now have totally confused myself

Thanks

[Bravia55HX]

Hi,

what most of us has learned so far is that you need a powered HDD for it to work properly, it meeds formatting to FAT32 file system and the tv will need to "register " it to work, bear in mind that it is only any good with the device its registered to, you cant go swapping it around on other devices for example if you record a show from the tv onto the drive you cant watch it on anything else!, should you find you no longer need it for this then you need to allow the tv to "de-register said drive then you can re-format it back to NTFS to use elsewhere, but dont take that for gospel since many have had problems with this. i for one wont bother as the TiVo box is a far better choice.