Hi guys and gals!
I finally had time to do the upgrade and guess what, it worked! No ghosting using Linux needed if you don’t mind losing the recording you have on the current drive. The special OS actually resides on the 8000HD board and not the hard drive.

What needs to be done:
1- Open the cover by removing three #10 Tamper-Proof TORX from the back. The cover then easily flips open.
2- Disconnect the IDE and power cable from the Maxtor 160GB 4R160L0 hard drive. Someone on AVS forum had mentioned a warranty sticker that needs to be removed. I couldn’t find one on my unit. So for the ones renting you might want to take a look.
3- Removed three more #10 Tamper-Proof TORX screws from the bracket that is holding the hard drive.
4- Remove the bracket and hard drive from the 8000HD.
5- Unscrew the four phillips that is holding the hard drive on the bracket.
6- Replace the hard drive on the bracket with any ATA-133 compatible hard drive. Mine was a MAXTOR 300GB HD-MA-6L300R0. (Look at my first post for more details.)
7- Place the bracket back in the unit with screws. Connect back the IDE and power cable.
8- Replace cover with screws.
9- Connect the power cable of the 8000HD, wait 45 minutes and presto!

Bring on 39 hours of HD marathon woohoo!:p

This can easily be performed on 8300HD or regular 8000 since they use all the same firmware. There is no external cable or extra conversion of SATA to PATA the recordings are very smooth. Also I find when selecting a recording and confirming, there is no more half a second delay. Very fast now. Not sure if this is because of the 16mb buffer or the faster seek time of the new hard drive.

Hey 57, can the subject of the thread be changed to “Internal hard disk drive upgrade for 8000HD works!” And the thread be placed as a sticky?

Cool!

Thanks Phatboyc.

Once management has watched all the season finalies I will try installing a new HDD in my 8300HD and try using dd to clone the old drive but I suspect that there may be geometry issues.

Just curious. Some on AVSforum have reported that the expansion drives show up in the diagnostics at full size but tend to get formatted with 20 - 30GB of space missing. Can you look at your diagnostic screens and report what the total reported drive size is and what the three partition sizes are?

It is reporting the size of the ITFS partition with 2097152 sectors and the AVFS partition with 584003200 sectors with a total of 586114704 sectors. If you multiply by 512 bytes per sector you get the full 300090 mb. Seems it is seeing the full 300gig. :)

the actual internal drives are not SATA?

I have added an external Sata - which still has some issues, so the internal

upgrade may be better, just a regulr IDE type is required?

Thanks

That is correct. A regular IDE will work. I recommend ATA-133 to have the same or faster seek time.

I have just upgraded my internal drive to a Western Digital 320gb (7200rpm 8mb). Seems to be working so far. It took me about 15 minutes to install (about 20 screws in total) but pretty easy. Waited about 45 minutes after putting the power on and everything was working.

I had a sticker that I touched by mistake and a VOID label appeared, I have had my 8300HD over a year already so its ok.

I just upgraded my SA8300HD to a Seagate ST3400832A 400 GB drive and everything seems to work fine so far. The ST3400832A is a 7200 RPM, 8 MB Cache drive. The old drive was a 160 GB Maxtor QuickView.

The install itself went without a hitch. I picked up a set of tamper resistant Torx bits at Princess Auto for $3.99. You only need the T10 size to do the job.

After removing the 3 screws at the back and lifting the lid the hard drive was clearly visible on the side opposite the power supply (on the left when viewed from the back). Removing 2 Torx screws from the "strut" and 3 Phillips screws holding the drive allowed me to remove the drive bracket. Four more Phillips screws dropped the drive off the bracket. Reverse the proceedure to mount the new drive.

My unit had a tamper sticker on the drive barely touching the bracket. I used needle nosed pliers to gently remove it and put it aside. When I was done I stuck it loosely to the old drive and put it away in case I ever need it again.

When I repowered the STB it went through some unusual gyrations (counting down to 0000 in hex numbers and then rebooted. A few minutes later the message HDDF appeared and the box hung. I rebooted using Vol+- & Info. Same countdown etc. this time but when it finished the HDD was ready to go.

I was not concerened about the HDD shenanegans because, when I installed an external SATA drive (way back when), the new drive required 2 boots to make it work too.

The system info shows 372 GB drive which should equate to 45-50 hours of HD recording. Now I'm ready for the new fall season.

ltj

1. Curious, why would you go to all that trouble when you can simply add an external, and had an external?

2. I assume you own the DVR?

1. I found the noise made by the external enclosure too annoying. The box I bought had a small internal high speed fan and the whine was quite noticeable. I tried disconnecting the fan but was concerned about heat. I had the Seagate on hand and when I read this thread I thought I'd take a chance.

2. Maybe. I have 2 and one comes with my package as a rental. I really don't know which is which and couldn't be bothered finding out. If/when it ever needs repair I'll put the old drive back in.

BTW, it is *way less* trouble installing a new HDD than doing the SATA upgrade though, obviously, more invasive. The change-out literally took less than 10 minutes and was as simple as installing the HDD in a SATA enclosure.

For the cost of the SATA enclosure and special cable you could easily buy a bigger drive and stick it in the STB.

Well, there's been a little water under the bridge since my last post.

The Seagate ST3400832A proved to be incredibly noisy. When I was recording 2 shows the disk head movement could be heard over the sound from the TV. I searched the web to see if there was any acoustic management from Seagate but no joy.

Another weird problem was that the STB took over a minute to start whenever I did a cold power up. Closer inspection revealed that the Seagate HDD did not power up when the STB was turned on but came up after about 50 seconds. If I powered on the STB before the HDD spun down (power off… 5 seconds… power on) it was fine but from cold it was bad news.

The Seagate performed so badly ended up cutting my losses and putting the original HDD back in.

Just for fun I bought a new aluminum fan-less SATA enclosure and reconnected my Maxtor 6V300F0 SATA drive and it worked well. I was impressed with how quiet the Maxtor was when it was recording. I decided to try my Maxtor 6H500R0 (500 GB) inside the box.

I connected it to my PC so I could use AMSET to put it in /QUIET mode and installed it in the STB. I won’t bore you with the installation details except to say I’ve got it down to about 4 minutes :-). The Maxtor worked really nice. Quiet when recording 2 HD channels and it powered up when I turned on the STB.

The SA8300HD diagnostic screen shows 479 GB available. That should be good for about 60 or so hours of HD recording. The next hurdle will be to see if the 8300 has any problems managing a lot of recorded programs. I’ll keep you posted.

ltj

Will the following drive work? Maxtor 300GB Ultra16 PATA Internal Hard Drive (http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?logon=&langid=EN&sku_id=0665000FS10077955&catid=). Its on sale at Future Shop for $109.99 (save $140).

If not, then I will probably buy the Maxtor 6L300R0 from MicroBytes (http://www.microbytes.com/computer/ordinateur/product_info.php?cPath=2050100&products_id=20970) for $119.00 since other people have bought so it must work.

The Maxtor 300GB Ultra16 PATA Internal Hard Drive from Future shop is exactly the same drive as the Maxtor 6L300R0 from MicroBytes.

I bought the one from Futureshop and it is written 6L300R0 on it...

Thanks PierreP - you are absolutely correct. I just bought the kit drive from FutureShop and it is indeed the 6L300R0 inside the box.

I think I got a really good deal. Best Buy has it on sale for $99.99 (until Sep 7th). At FS the regular price is $169.99 - its not on sale this week. So because of their best price guarantee - they meet any advertised price plus 10% of the difference. I ended up buying it at FS for $92.99 + tx = $105.96.

I got Maxtor 6L300R0 too last Thursday using pricematch (against BB's $99.99) and additional $5 off with Future Shop credit card, so it ended up being $87.98 in my case. Seems to be working fine in my SA 8300HD.

:D

Thank you for this thread and all the inspiration it provided! Just finished my upgrade, to the same Maxtor 300gb hard drive mentioned at the top of this thread. The process worked as easily as mentioned in the posts that preceded mine. This could not have been much easier. I would only add one point to what 'Phatboyc' said in post #21, I had to connect the cable to the back of the PVR for the process to complete fully (I tried by just hooking up the power).
Hopefully my wife will be able to manage all her shows without running out of recording space ... my life will be so much better now! :rolleyes:

ATG

Just completed the upgrade on my SA8000HD with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB hard drive. It went flawlessly. I purchased it from OEM Express at 109$, backed up by a 5 year warranty. :D

Thanks for this thread, I will finally stop running out of disk space! (for a while at least)

FYI:

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=53897

Just for the record. Mine hasn't been making any strange noise and I have it running for 8 1/2 months now with the power hungry Maxtor.

But anyone purchasing a new drive should look at the current draw rating. No more than 530 mA when it reads/write which is about the same as original.

I'm having a heck of a time trying to find a #10 tamper-proof torx bit. Cdn Tire seems to carry the #15 and #20, PartSource doesn't carry them at all, and the link to Princess Auto doesn't work anymore.

Does anyone know where to get these in Toronto (or alternately, if anyone in the TO area wants to sell/loan me theirs, I'm interested!)

Scott

SAYAL ELECTRONICS
Victoria Park at GordonBaker