Which 1TB drive works best in which box?

richie05

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I know that there are a few threads running now on upgrading disk drives in the various boxes. After reading some of them at length a
I decided to upgrade my Thomson 3007 with a WD Green Energy AV drive, I think it was an EVDS or EADS. Either way after sorting out the failed recording and rebooting problem I had, I now have the sticking and blocky pixels and audio drop out on HD recordings, live pause on HD and Anytime HD. All SD stuff records and plays fine.
I have seen mention of Samsung F2 drives and others and people mentioning changing buffer and power save features on the drives to help older boxes but nothing definitive. There is also mention of similar recording and playback issues from people with brand new 1TB HD boxes.
Any clarification here would be much appreciated as a mate of mine has dropped me a small pallet of faulty Thomson SkyHD boxes for me to repair or replace disk drives and power supplies and I would really prefer not to spend 80 to 100 euros a time finding out which drive works best.

Regards,
Richie
 
Not sure - might be worth reading the Copy+ fourms - lots of HDD upgrade discussions on there if I recall
 
Samsung Spinpoint F3 is my preferred option. All the boxes I have upgraded (20+) have been fine so far. I heard that the F2 model had some reliability issues.

The F3 1TB is only around £45 so good price too..
 
From experience the 1TB Seagate Pipeline HD2 works perfectly in both Pace and Amstrad DRX890 boxes.
 
Samsung Spinpoint F3 is my preferred option. All the boxes I have upgraded (20+) have been fine so far. I heard that the F2 model had some reliability issues.

The F3 1TB is only around £45 so good price too..

I also support this, the F3 is a high performance drive I have one in my PC and sky box.

For the sky box I used the tool from samsung's website to set its AAC (Advanced Acoustic Controls) mode to 'quiet'. No issues with playback performance, drive is pretty much silent and no issues with the fan on the box misbehaving either.

Perhaps it uses an extra watt or two power-wise but why pay more for a 'green' unreliable F2 drive that'll struggle on the performance side when an F3 will behave itself and breeze anything the sky box demands of it :)
 
Has anyone tried a 2TB drive yet?
 
Has anyone tried a 2TB drive yet?

It depends which box you want to use it in. It is beginning to appear that there is a hardware limitation to the number of programmes that the boxes can cope with in the internal memory on the box. This is certainly so on Thomson boxes but whether it applies to the other boxes with 300GB HDDs I do not know yet. The boxes were originally designed with 300GB HDDs and the internal memory and CPUs to suit this. This is also apparently why the original firmware will only format a HDD to around 500GB and copy+ is required for larger sizes. The programme number limit will affect those recording large numbers of small programmes but not so much those recording large programmes such as movies. This problem manifests as a progressive slowdown of box functions when approaching the limit on 1TB HDDs.

The latest Amstrad boxes have increased internal memory size and faster CPUs which help stop this problem.
 
I have the F2 in my amstrad x890c after i bought a seagate drive and a noisy fan and swapped it over with my pc's spare drive. It still had the noisy fan so bought a fan controller and turned the speed down. Apart from that it has been working fine
 
Hi guys, sorry to re-open the thread, but I'm struggling with this as well. I've got a day 1 Thomson Sky HD box, which has had a new power supply, and now a new disk. Probably didn't do enough research, but bought a "Seagate Pipeline ST31000322CS 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 5900rpm 8MB Cache" when the original drive started to play up.

Seemed to be fine at first (a month ago), but now it's basically useless for recording HD. Both Anytime and scheduled HD recordings stutter and pixelate at regular intervals. And if I FF or Rwd at 30x (on both HD and SD recordings), the box just shuts down.

So, before I switch the Seagate into one of the PCs, and buy another. Anyone got an opinion on which HDD for a Thomson box, or is Samsung Spinpoint the safe way to go?

Thanks in anticipation.

Paul

Also posted on Copy+ forum. There is a current thread with someone having the same problem with the Pipeline drive.
 
Last edited:
Hi guys, sorry to re-open the thread, but I'm struggling with this as well. I've got a day 1 Thomson Sky HD box, which has had a new power supply, and now a new disk. Probably didn't do enough research, but bought a "Seagate Pipeline ST31000322CS 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 5900rpm 8MB Cache" when the original drive started to play up.

Seemed to be fine at first (a month ago), but now it's basically useless for recording HD. Both Anytime and scheduled HD recordings stutter and pixelate at regular intervals. And if I FF or Rwd at 30x (on both HD and SD recordings), the box just shuts down.

So, before I switch the Seagate into one of the PCs, and buy another. Anyone got an opinion on which HDD for a Thomson box, or is Samsung Spinpoint the safe way to go?

Thanks in anticipation.

Paul

Also posted on Copy+ forum. There is a current thread with someone having the same problem with the Pipeline drive.

Hello - I have a Spinpoint F3 in an original Thomson - absolutely fine for almost a year now. I know at the time I upgraded there was a huge thread and the WD VVS drives caused problems for me and a few others. I also remember that several forum members also had a result with the Samsung F2.

If I was you I would go for an F3 - assuming it is the HDD at fault (I mean confirm the new PSU is OK)
 
Thanks for this. Sorry, I probably wasn't 100% clear. The upgraded PSU went in many months ago, and fixed a whole lot of problems at the time. The disk upgrade was a response to a whole set of different problems.

Paul
 

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