mattwnz: I believe they had a very hard DOA rate, as I had three failures out of the box. But once going they seem to be rock solid, as I have 3 which are all running fine, and friends and family who I suggested to are also all running fine. I beleive the harddrives can also be replaced if they do fail, and HDs are almost a consumable, as they will always fail eventually.

I got both of mine unused 3-4 years ago via TradeMe for under $200 each and they never skipped a beat.  I replaced one noisy fan with a 3rd party version, and replaced a hard drive with a 2Tb drive for extra storage about a year ago (should have done that earlier!) following online instructions.  Fluffed it up by not reading instructions carefully and lost my recordings, but all the settings including future scheduled recordings were saved.