Humax Foxsat-HDR: upgrade its internal drive to 1.5TB? Or even 2TB?

Leopard

Hi, guys,

Has anyone attempted this?

If so, did it work and what make and model of hard drive did you use?



As anyone who's bought one of these PVRs knows, they're a brilliant (and Money Saving) piece of kit.

Their only shortcoming is their capacity-challenged 320 GB hard drive. It isn't large enough. Humax put a 320 GB drive in it (a Seagate Pipeline) because that was the only way to keep its price under the psychologically important barrier of 300 Gordon Brown mini-pounds.

One can see why they did that but it's a shame they didn't also offer a second model with at least a 750 GB option.

So, one has to upgrade it oneself.

The first step is to give it some immediate additional storage space via its USB2 port: for that, I used one of the £70 (delivered) Toshiba 1TB external drives kindly posted and linked on here by MSE Lawrence and Traveller1981. These contain a Western Digital 1TB WD10EAVS, which works inaudibly and well in this external support role.

What the thing really needs, however, is an internal drive of greatly larger capacity - but which won't overheat, pull too much power from the PSU of the Humax, or be noisy.

Proven to perform this task safely, internally and well, by all accounts, has been the 1TB Western Digital WD10EVCS drive, which was specifically manufactured by Western Digital for PVR suitability and the like. This now appears to have been superseded by the WD10EVVS model.

But even a terabyte drive will only triple the FoxSat-HDR's originally supplied 320 GB of internal storage.

What it really needs is 1.5TB, or even 2TB, of internal storage - because the internal drive is what it writes to.

Any heat and/or power consumption complications arising from such an upgrade drive could, if necessary, be overcome by putting it in an external (powered) enclosure and running it by means of a flat eSATA lead attached to the Humax box's internal connection.

But the crucial - and so far unanswered - question is whether the Humax box, itself, can address a drive of greater capacity than 1TB.


So, has anyone tried using a 1.5TB (or greater capacity) hard drive with a Humax FoxSat-HDR - either internally or attached to its internal SATA leads?

And, if so, what make and model of drive did you use, and did it work?


Or is one insurmountably limited to a 1TB internal drive by the present firmware of the Humax box?

Please do post your experiences with this: everyone with a Humax FoxSat-HDR would like to read them!

Thanks.

stestestesteste

I tried a 1.5gb seagate with no luck.
first tried installing to see how humax handled it - hit detected the drive, said it needed formatting, front display said "initialising partition" and I left it overnight. Needless to say this was still there in the morning.
I called humax who said they didn't know if 1gig+ was supported, they suggested I formatted to fat32 from a pc which I did. Same results. I read this drive might have a firmware problem, analysed from seagate web site, but it said it was fine.
In fact I can format on a pc and it does work fine.

I'm returning ti dabs and getting a 1tb which I believe works...woiuld much prefer 2tb

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?QuickLinx=56WJ

savemoney

I have one I got one when they 1st came out. I must admit within days I found out 320gb is limited, I am waiting though until later this year and price may drop before upgrade

amcluesent

http://www.hummy.org.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=5059

Leopard

stestestesteste,

Very many thanks indeed for posting the result of your experiment. :beer:

It does appear, therefore, that 1TB is the limit of what a Humax FoxSat-HDR (and also a Sky box, from what I've read) can address under current firmware.

I'll go the Western Digital WD10EVCS terabyte route then, if I can still source one. Otherwise a WD10EVVS.

The difference between the two, in so far as I can divine it, is that the new WD10EVVS has two platters of 500GB, whereas the previous WD10EVCS had three platters of 333 GB. The WD10EVVS should thus draw even less current and run even cooler. However, the WD10EVCS also had a 16 MB cache, whereas the WDEVVS appears to have an 8 GB cache. Both are probably just as good for the purpose but the WD10EVCS has been proven to work without problems and I find that reassuring.

The 1.5TB drive I had in mind for this application, incidentally, was the Samsung F2 EcoGreen.

It's certainly disappointing: if one can fill the standard 320 GB drive with ease when there are only two part-time channels of HD available, an upgrade is going to become more or less essential for everyone when more channels come on line.

As you point out sagely, 2TB of main drive would really be desirable, to give it enough elbow room.

Again, my thanks. After so much widespread speculation everywhere else, I'm extremely grateful to you for providing the definitive answer for us all! :money:


Perhaps it will become possible next year... :santa2:

amcluesent wrote: »

http://www.hummy.org.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=5059

amcluesent,

I did read that thread (and many others, on many other sites) before posting my question. There is much promulgation generally of the idea of installing an internal drive (or an external drive connected by an eSATA cable to the internal drive connectors) of larger capacity than 1TB but I could find nobody, anywhere who'd actually tried doing it.

There's some helpful information (and pictures in Post #59) here on how to perform the internal upgrade and I posted here some additional advice on how to configure a standard external drive for offline storage on the Humax via its USB2 port (which involves formatting it in EXT3 to avoid the 4GB file restriction that arises under FAT32).

patrick0

Various forums suggest that the Foxsat has problems with automatically formatting hard disks larger than 1TB.

In order to format it manually you need to connect the drive to a PC (via the hard disk connectors or via a £10 USB adaptor).

Then boot Linux (is free) off a CD ROM and partition the disk (using fdisk) then format it with the ext3 filesystem.

I'm planning on doing it in a couple of weeks and will post all the steps once I've got it working.

2TB disks are still expensive - £150. So you're better off going for 1TB in the meantime as they're £50ish now.

macman

Just FYI, the original 320GB model has been supplemented by a 500GB version which is still under £300 at present-though I realise that isn't going to be enough for you Leopard.
I suppose you could always hook up two Foxsats, using a quad LNB and a spare HDMI input? Though possibly not the most economic solution...

MX5huggy

Work have just got one of these http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo.php

with the network option http://www.drobo.com/products/droboshare.php

I am tempted to borrow it to see if I could use it with the HDR.

Then I can just add more space as needed for not much cost. The initial cost is a bit high.But I do the network functionality.

fwor

MX5huggy wrote: »

Work have just got one of these http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo.php

You may be Ok (but bandwidth-limited) if you're going to use USB, but if you're looking to do something similar via e-Sata, beware: the PC's eSata port needs to support "port multiplier" for an external RAID box to work, and many don't. Mine doesn't :-(

@ Patrick0: If you are using one of the main Linux liveCDs, use GPARTED to partition and format the disk. It's a proper GUI front end for the linux partitioner, and very much easier than doing it at the command line!

MX5huggy

I want to see if the Hummy could talk via USB and the Drobo via LAN