Am I right to regret upgrading my hd?

[fatjock]

I may be way off the mark ..... but ..... it seems to me that when upgrading the hd on our own, we seem to experience problems either at the start or sometime during its early life. Depending on the hd we fit (make and size) some have more problems than others HOWEVER it is clear that by doing it ourselves we may save ourselves money but we end up getting grief as well. Reading other threads, I personally suspect that sky encourage you to perform miltiple 'housekeepings' (knowing that they can render your hd knacked until you format it overnight on a pc!) or release software updates which they know will cause problems.

Conspiracy? Perhaps but put yourself in their position. You have developed a new system (sky+) but fatally underestimated the memory requirement of the user. These users suss it out and upgrade their systems themselves. Sky upgrade their system to the 160gb hd but want to charge you 5 times the cost. Their answer??? ... continually cause the loners problems and they may eventualy give in. Put yourself in the user's position .... you try recording an important programme, it fails, you try again, it fails. You get an error message saying sky+ recording/play facility dead. You perform housekeeping etc etc but your trust in the increased hd is falling. You never seemed to have these issues when it was the original sky 40gb hd. (this is at least how I feel at the moment .... wife nagging and kids up in arms as they are told that they will have to wipe the dust of the video machine until the hd is fixed!)

Anyone agree? Am I right to feel the way I do or am I just on a downer?

[Peter Fugaccia]

The part I agree with you on, is the risk that sky will release a software update that doesn't support our upgraded hard drives. Any item can fail, look at the number of unmodified SKY+ boxes people report failing on the forums and recordings lost.

Lots of folk seem to get by without problems and it tends to be mainly problems we read about on the forums. I'm glad I've upgraded, no probs so far (fingers crossed) and worst case scenario the old drive goes back in and hopefully I'm no worse off than originally. I may lose recorded programmes, but I've lost tapes before/recorded over programmes etc. So for around £60/£70 I think its worth the risk to upgrade. I think you have to go through these forums carefully to choose a replacement drive that reduces your risk and i took several weeks of reading them before I opted for a Maxtor Quickview replacement.

Hope you get the H/D sorted out as I'm sure a few weeks with tapes and you'll remember the good times with SKY+. When it works it is great and to date I've been very lucky (keeping fingers crossed).

[davidcotton]

Look at the amount of hassle most 160 users have had. Seems your stuffed which ever way you decide to upgrade (cynical mode OFF).

[JohnG]

To be honest I don't know how people find enough things to record to warrant a bigger hard disk ! I use Sky+ all the time but have never been over 70% full.