View Full Version : Upgrading Sky HD box
Hi,
The inlaws are wanting to upgrade the hard drive in their Sky HD box to provide more space but they're not the most technically minded.
Yesterday they were telling me a few things they'd "discovered", including...
1. They've been told that the Sky HD box won't recognise a disk larger than 500GB
2. They've found a seller on ebay who claims to provide 1TB discs that will work as they're "formatted" by some other means.
3. They've seen someone selling 500GB discs with installation instructions for £100!
Now firstly, does anyone know if this 500GB limit is true? If so, then is this vendor of 1TB disks on the level?
Also, the vendor selling the 500GB discs is taking them for a ride IMO as they could surely get the disk for half that and find some instructions online themselves (or rather I could).
I'm basically after any info on this. As I don't have Sky I'm not up on such things but, from what I've heard, I was under the impression that you could slap any disk in there and it would just work, with the Sky box initialising it automatically, but that getting a 5400rpm drive was advisable as 7200rpm drives could produce too much noise and/or heat. Is any of this true?
If anyone here has done anything similar I'd love to hear your experiences/advice :)
leowyatt
19-01-2009, 17:57
I think Mr Burble has an upgraded HD box :)
The 500Gb thing is kinda true. If you take a brand new 500Gb out of the box and put it into the Sky HD box it'll work but do the same with a 1Tb drive and it won't.
To get around that you need to clone your original drive onto the new one and then shove the new one it. That's how I got my 750Gb drive working.
Some drives are said to be better than others, I forget what the suggested ones are now as I changed mine about a year ago. 5400rpm drives are recommended as 7200rpm drives seem to tip the scales on temperature meaning that the cooling fan underneath the drive will be on all the time and it's a very noisy fan.
Changing the drive is a doddle, it's just a case of taking off the lid, unscrewing the plastic caddy that the drive sits in, unscrewing the drive from the caddy then doing the reverse to put it back together.
If warranty is an issue, the only warranty sticker is on the bottom of the caddy over one of the screws holding the drive into the caddy. So if they wanted to not break the warranty seal they'd need to find an alternative way of mounting the drive in the box.
A quick question as I was thinking of upgrading our box. Are the drives IDE or sata?
Also what size drive is in there as standard?
Sky HD boxes are SATA. Standard drive is 300Gb with about 160Gb available for recordings, the rest is set aside for Sky Anytime.
I forget what the suggested ones are now as I changed mine about a year ago. 5400rpm drives are recommended as 7200rpm drives seem to tip the scales on temperature meaning that the cooling fan underneath the drive will be on all the time and it's a very noisy fan.
I don't know whether or not they're the recommended drives, but the WD Green Power lot fit the bill in the cool/quiet category.
Changing the drive is a doddle, it's just a case of taking off the lid, unscrewing the plastic caddy that the drive sits in, unscrewing the drive from the caddy then doing the reverse to put it back together.
You'd need the right bits of course. The old Sky boxes used Torx 'security' bits I believe. Fortunately, if that's still the case, they're readily available.
Also, keep well away from the power supply. I don't know if Sky boxes now have covers over the power components, but some boxes don't, and even with the power off you can still get zapped by the heavy duty capacitors in the power supply. That tends to hurt. :)
I think I've got a Samsung of some description in mine.
From what I remember Sky HD boxes are all philips and posidrive screws as was my original Sky + box (which came with a paltry 40Gb HD!).
Yeah, the PSU's aren't covered in the HD boxes either. Seems a bit silly to me.
Maybe it was TiVo I was thinking of then for having Torx screws. The process is similar (except you have to clone the drive, and fettle about with it a bit afterwards).
Now my original Sky+ box is 'un-subbed' I'm waiting a bit to see if they eventually turn off the Sky+ functionality on it. If they don't, I might play. :)
Heh, can't believe I wrote my first reply and didn't say how to clone the drive! You need a bit of software called Copy+ (http://www.skycopyplus.co.uk/).
Ooh, thanks. If I do as I suggested above, I'll give +Extract a go too. It would be good to have the FTA stuff on my Sky+ disk in original quality (rather than the second generation copy I currently have).
Thanks for the very useful info Burble! :D
Couple of quick questions:
1. Does that copy software allow you to take an image of the original disk and then restore it to the new one, if you can't connect both at once? It's not entirely clear from the site.
2. With a larger disk, does Anytime take the same amount of space (i.e. 140GB-ish), or is it a percentage of the total size?
Out of interest, I know the HD boxes are made by a few different manufacturers now, but are they all physically identical - i.e. made to Sky's spec?
Del Lardo
19-01-2009, 23:16
Yeah, the PSU's aren't covered in the HD boxes either. Seems a bit silly to me.
Why put a cover over the PSU when the box is not intented to be opened by the end user?
STB pricing is very competitive and as a manufacturer we always ensure that there is no 'fat' on the STB. It may sound daft to spend a several man months refining a board to design to save $1 per STB but when you are building several million units a year those savings suddenly seem very worth while.
Quite simply a cover isn't fitted because it isn't required. You void the warantee the moment you open the case and the manufacturer/Sky are saving over a million $ a year by not fitting a cover to the PSU.
Thanks for the very useful info Burble! :D
Couple of quick questions:
1. Does that copy software allow you to take an image of the original disk and then restore it to the new one, if you can't connect both at once? It's not entirely clear from the site.
2. With a larger disk, does Anytime take the same amount of space (i.e. 140GB-ish), or is it a percentage of the total size?
Out of interest, I know the HD boxes are made by a few different manufacturers now, but are they all physically identical - i.e. made to Sky's spec?
1 - Yep. I only had 1 USB caddy available at the time so I made an image of the original HD to my NAS, swapped the HD in the caddy and pushed the image onto the new HD.
2 - I think it's a fixed size rather than a percentage of the drive so it should still be about 140Gb. I'm a bit grumpy about that tbh as I have anytime turned off so would have liked to be able to use that 140Gb for my own recordings.
I've no idea about the different versions, mine is one of the first generation boxes, made (I think) by Pace.
Why put a cover over the PSU when the box is not intented to be opened by the end user?
I agree and meant to imply the same in my post but seemingly forgot.
1 - Yep. I only had 1 USB caddy available at the time so I made an image of the original HD to my NAS, swapped the HD in the caddy and pushed the image onto the new HD.
2 - I think it's a fixed size rather than a percentage of the drive so it should still be about 140Gb. I'm a bit grumpy about that tbh as I have anytime turned off so would have liked to be able to use that 140Gb for my own recordings.
I've no idea about the different versions, mine is one of the first generation boxes, made (I think) by Pace.
Cheers,
The Anytime stuff is a total joke tbh - Sky's attempt to con their customers into thinking they have genuine VoD when it's nothing of the sort. I still believe the long term future is VoD for everything where the broadcasters will "release" programmes according to a schedule but viewers will then be able to stream them down to their boxes on demand as and when they see fit. I really can't see where such systems would leave Sky as they have no way of implementing this.
I think the original boxes were made by Thompson but I could be wrong.
I think the original boxes were made by Thompson but I could be wrong.
Yep, that sounds about right. I said Pace at the time but wasn't convinced.
Turns out my Sky+ was still working only because Sky ****ed up. Fixed now. I'll be opening it up at some point to pull the existing disk. Whether I bother putting a new one in depends on whether I bother going back to Sky in the summer. :)
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