Which tuner did you get and are you happy with it? I bought a Viewtv At-163 for $35 in March and I am not crazy about it. It freezes pretty regularly and I either have to wait several minutes for it to reboot or unplug it. I'll be watching a recording and it will go blank. Sometimes starting the recording over works and sometimes not. I tried some USB2 thumb drives which didn't work (I expected that though). I spent another $20 on a 64GB USB3 thumb drive that seems ok.
I have the Homeworx HW-150PVR. I use a cheap 32gig Sandisk thumb drive and I have had no troubles recording. I can get one full length football game and a handful of TV shows before space becomes an issue, but I typically DVR things that I intend to watch as soon as I get home. With an OTA antenna the thing is absolutely fantastic. It names and numbers the channels properly. It pulls program information as well as a program guide, so you can actually schedule recordings by the show (rather than by date and time).
The problem I have is on Verizon's end. Since I pay for local service I can use Verizon's QAM channels. Verizon's QAM doesn't play nicely with any tuner. It initially downloads more than 300 channels, most of which don't have any content. The other problem is that Verizon doesn't broadcast any information over QAM, not even channel name, and, of course, none of the channels are numbered in a manner that makes sense, they're all 8 digits with a random hyphen thrown in for fun. Even when you manually name channels, the names will disappear after a while.