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9200T Hard Drive Upgrade
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I upgraded the 9200T's Seagate 160Gb 'ACE' hard disk to a Seagate 250Gb Barracuda 7200.9, last night.
Scheduled some late (early) recordings before going to bed. They seem to have recorded OK and the box is working fine.
Just to let you all know and confirm that the upgrade is possible and that I've done it.
Any questions before I remove it after this weekend of testing?
Screenshot: http://roo.st-andrews.ac.uk/humax/250Gb.JPG
Scheduled some late (early) recordings before going to bed. They seem to have recorded OK and the box is working fine.
Just to let you all know and confirm that the upgrade is possible and that I've done it.
Any questions before I remove it after this weekend of testing?
Screenshot: http://roo.st-andrews.ac.uk/humax/250Gb.JPG
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How quiet (or not) is that disk compared to the standard one in the 9200 please? Also did you notice any difference in performance, eg startup times or moving through the list of recordings and playing one?
What happened to the Mp3 and photo partition on the new drive?
When you reverse the situation do you have the ability to interrogate the Seagate and find out any more about the file structure?
Any changes in elinker speed ( I don't know the speed of the old drive but am always looking for bottelnecks).
P.S. Since you took the box apart could you make a note of the USB controller chip and PM me with the details please?
Well done!
With regards to performance - everything seems to be as normal. I think the box won't be any different in this aspect as only the recorded programmes are kept on the HDD itself. If there are problems I would expect them to manifest in the recordings themselves (like broken images because the disk couldn't keep up with the transmission, etc). As yet no picture/sound problems on playback of recordings...
Like andro101010 I'd be interested to know if you can glean anything about the file structure by connecting the drive to your PC.
Interogate the HDD once removed, is the idea I had, as part of this exercise. This could be interesting and I will certainly do so. I don't think the filesystem (FS) is very complicated. It took less than a second to 'format' the raw disk. (Last night I also installed a 160Gb Seagate disk on my Windows XP box using NTFS and that took a hour and a half to format! We will see...
Heat dissipation? umm, again the ACE drives are designed to be power efficient, etc so I expect a normal HDD to give out more heat as it consumes more... It is also a faster 7200rpm drive as opposed to the 5600rpm of the ACE... I also don't think heat will be a problem in the 9200T as it has a fan. The only concern will be power consumption as the power supply might not be rated to power this normal disk...
I will now look into the MP3/JPEG partitions - just to let you know I've never used this facility... Also will fire up eLinker and transfer a few programmes off it... I will let you know how I get on...
Nope, but let me do that right now...
Recording BBC1 (missing), ITV2 (corrie), and watching CBBC... seems OK (interactive services work) at the mo... will wait until the programmes finish...
There is some software you can run in XP to make the drive visible, but you will not be able to copy anything off it.
No, the drive won't be readable by XP. I have some disk analysis/rescue programs that I could try... I will hook it up to a Linux box too (hopefully that will have more tools, anyone know of any?)
If the transfering of recordings by a tool such as twinrip works with a direct disk connection like mine via High speed USB (i.e. not going through the hummy USB and CPU) then it will be a lot quicker maybe
Viewing the Corrie recording made earlier seems fine with two channels recording at the same time...
I'm not at home to test it but I wouldnt be suprised. Might be that the humax is programmed to only record (buffer or record) up to two things at the same time only leaving the third as just watchable live.
EDIT: might be possible in the situation where the hummy is recording two channels at the same time on the one tuner and it may just let you be able to buffer the any channel option left on the second tuner. I.e. set BBC1 and BBC2 to record starting at the same time, both get allocated to record from one tuner, leaving the second tuner able to watch any 3rd channel - which could be bufferable
Just tried manually recording BBC1 and BBC2 and watching ITV1 and still there is no buffer. The 'info bar' (acheived when play is pressed) shows no 'play' arrow in the 'sphere' on the left of that bar... so I assume that is saying that I am watching live TV rather than a buffered TV channel...
change /dev/ad3 to the device name the OS uses. This will write the first 64 sectors to a (binary) file /tmp/file
If you do want to do this under Windows then DSKPROBE.EXE, which is part of the NT4 Resource Kit, will perform much the same tasks as the above *nix commands (but with a GUI interface). No idea where you will get the NT4 Res Kit nowadays - I've had it since I had NT4 - but if you PM me I'll send you a copy (of DSKPROBE) plus the help file.
If possible it would be nice to see a picture inside the case.
http://roo.st-andrews.ac.uk/humax/9200Tinside.jpg
Some other stuff under http://roo.st-andrews.ac.uk/humax/ too. The Oz version of the 9200T. The pics dated today (and eLinker grabs) are mine...
As Marc says the Hummy does it all (in less than a second!) - I guess that's what the 8Gb reserved is... for MP3s & JPEGs?
I am about to hook up a PC via the USB and transfer JPEGs and MP3s to the Hummy and download some video...
I have a disk imager (software) which I will try out. The first thing to find out is whether this software can see the disk (raw or otherwise). If it is recognised then a clone image is very possible. And for backup you can split the image into serveral files...
The problem is: I can't see this being very practical. It took me ages to disassemble the box and the drive to fit a new one in. If you had to do it constantly - it would be a pain the neck...
I agree but the way I have set things up this is not necesserily true once you have done some work once.
What I did was fit a short 3 way connector IDE cable so one end is fitted to the motherboard and the other is fitted to the hard disk. The middle connector is attached to the IDE to USB2 connector (its also got a firewire connector!). The USB cable is coiled inside the case with the end just poking through the cam slot opening. I havent done any work on this since I did it because I havent had the time to go back to it but the thought was to be able to connect it up to the laptop when necesery - I pull this out when I wanted to connect to my laptop and push it back in when not needed. You could always make the necessery cut outs on the box but I didnt want to damage anything in case I one day want to sell it.
The disk cloning utilities should see the disk no problem. Windows XP does but you cant do anything with it. It will need initialising for a start plus formatting to use under normal windows anyway. In XP if you go into 'manage' (right click My Computer) and follow the tree: Storage>disk management> it will show up at the bottom (if you have one drive hard drive in your laptop/PC it will be called Disk0 in windows and when you connect the hummy disk it will be Disk1.