I bought a Sony HDD/DVD recorder a while ago.
Very mixed feelings about it. It does what it's supposed to do but it takes almost as long as the computer to boot up - sits there saying 'welcome', then 'load, load, load' before it will do anything.
Even when switched off it makes a lot of noise - it's only a couple of feet from my pillow and it updates the EPG every hour, whirr, click x3, and it seems to do some sort of housekeeping in the early hours.
The manual is poorly written and laid out.