Thompson HD Upgrade (WD1001FALS Confirmed working)

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Thompson HD Upgrade (WD1001FALS Confirmed working)

Postby jcoles7 » Fri Oct 23, 2009 3:12 pm

Hello All,

My current HD box is in need of an upgrade I am planning to use a 1TB Western Digital WD1001FALS Caviar Black, SATA 3Gb/s, 7200rpm, 32MB Cache (Once I can get my hands on one). Has anyone ever used one of these before ??

From what I understand Copy+ copies all the programs over to my new drive.

Now if I did not want to copy over my programs do I still need to use Copy+ to copy over the SKY Operating System. Or is there some other way of getting the Sky OS onto a new drive ??

Br Jason
Last edited by jcoles7 on Sat Nov 14, 2009 1:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Thompson HD Upgrade

Postby pcbbc » Fri Oct 23, 2009 8:39 pm

Use of Copy+ is essential with a drive over 508GB because the Sky box can not format a disk this big on its own.
There is a bug in the format code that means a 1TB drive is only formatted to 492GB.

There is no OS on the Sky disk, all of the software is held in FLASH memory inside the actual box. Only data files are stored on the drive.
However you must do a copy from an existing disk, as even an empty must contain some pre-initalised files that Copy+ can not create from scratch.
Therefore a donor disk is required to copy them from.
The donor disk can be the 1TB drive if you FSR it in the Sky box first (will only be formatted to 492GB) and then backup and restore with Copy+ (which will give you the full 1TB capacity once restored).
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Re: Thompson HD Upgrade (WD1001FALS Confirmed working)

Postby jcoles7 » Sat Nov 14, 2009 1:22 pm

Hello All,

Just to let you all know I can confirm that the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (WD1001FALS) works flawlessly in the Thomson (902020) HD box. I did have to enable the AAM using a tool called HDDSCAN from http://www.hddscan.com as the drive was much too noisy. You can only set it at 128 no other setting in the app. Now it is very quiet better than the standard drive I think.

Anyway I am now able to record 2 HD channels and playback a third HD recording without a single stutter and also fast forward works flawlessly as well. IF I even tried this before the box crashed.

Also just for info I got the power supply upgraded by the guy on this site http://www.stevetowells.co.uk/, it now has a MKII Satcure kit. Did not fancy trying it myself.

All in all very happy with the results.

Best Regards

Jason
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