Best drive to reliably updrade Amstrad Sky HD box?

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Best drive to reliably updrade Amstrad Sky HD box?

Postby markshark » Thu Jun 03, 2010 5:28 pm

Hi all,

I was about to jump in and buy a Western Digital WD20EVDS 2TB drive to upgrade my Amstrad SKY HD box. However, after a scan of these forums there appears to be some issues with these drives and Amstrad boxes? Therefore, could someone please let me know what the largest drives are that have been proven to work reliabily with my box?

The details are:

Model No: 1_5-016 (might have my dashes the wrong way round as not in front of the box)
Ver. No: 4F3006
OS: 1.32B12
EPG: ......8.4 multi-platform

Cheers,

Mark.
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Re: Best drive to reliably updrade Amstrad Sky HD box?

Postby markshark » Fri Jun 04, 2010 10:38 am

Surely someone can confirm an upgrade for this model that works fine? The biggest drive that I have seen reliably installed in the forums is the 1TB WD10EVDS? However, were the issues with bigger drives down to the bugs in Copy+ with little endian drives that have now been fixed?

I'd just like to be sure before I shell out on a drive?

Ta.
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Re: Best drive to reliably updrade Amstrad Sky HD box?

Postby njeo » Sat Jun 05, 2010 8:15 am

The 1.2.0.6 Beta of Copy+ is able to work with the larger drives such as your 2Tb drive.
It's not so much the drive, which according to WD is designed for use in PVRs. It's more than capable of performing its functions. It's a lot quieter than the Seagate hdd inside my Pace which is noisy in use and when spinning up/down. The problem is the Amstrad box and firmware itself which isn't fast enough or robust enough to cope. The EPG will slow down considerably the more programmes are stored on it and became very frustrating to use; button presses will either not register or take up to 10 seconds to action. An upgrade to 2Tb is doable, but I had lots of issues that are documented in other threads, the main one to consider is whether your box exhibits the issue mine developed, whereby all recordings made after date X became unplayable and resulted in a blue screen; the only resolution to that was to do a full system reset, which wiped the entire drive. With 2Tb, that's a lot of recordings to lose. You could back the recordings up via Copy+ and then do a FSR, but when you try to restore the recordings, you will need to delete the new blank partition that the Sky box just generated, and Copy+ will restore your old partition and recordings. Then you're back to square one.
Perhaps the Amstrad may cope better with a 1Tb drive, rather than the 1.5Tb or 2Tb drives - I don't know, though, as I haven't tried a 1Tb drive and no longer have the Amstrad.

On the other hand, when my Amstrad 1.5Tb worked, which it did for a few weeks, it was brilliant having so much space and every recording was 1%. On my Pace 320Gb, the last episode of Lost takes up 12%! I'm having to delete things again to make way for new things; not a concern on a 1.5Tb / 2Tb drive.
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Re: Best drive to reliably updrade Amstrad Sky HD box?

Postby markshark » Mon Jun 07, 2010 2:13 pm

Thanks njeo. I'm trying a 1TB WD drive soon, so will post on how that goes.

Fingers crossed :?
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Re: Best drive to reliably updrade Amstrad Sky HD box?

Postby markshark » Fri Jun 18, 2010 10:27 am

Well I finally found the time and upgraded to a WD1001FALS. All works fine so far, just a little noisy on the head seek but nothing unbearable.

Just hope it stays stable!! :)
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