Saturday 11 January 2014

Fitting a new Hard Drive to a Humax Fox T2 (Click of Death)

The Seagate Pipeline HD series of drives from Seagate are now catalogued and supplied as Video 3.5 HDD which more accurately defines their optimum purpose.
They can be used in a PC of course but is really the drive of choice for Personal Video recorders (PVR).
I have just fitted this (Jan 2014) to A Humax Fox T2 recorder having been quoted £150 for a factory repair (yes just out of the 2 year warranty)
With a Philips screwdriver with a magnetic tip to lift out the loose screws it took about 5 minutes.
Only the tiny fan connector was awkward to get at. The drive is in cage with silent resilient mounts.
Powering up the drive was recognised as needing formatting for PVR use. Contrary to reports I had read where this takes hours it was about 3 minutes and all the scheduled recordings were still in place.
No need to pack and ship the Humax off for repair.
How do you know if you need a new drive anyway ?
If the Storage Option on the Menu is greyed out and cant be selected (make sure no recordings are taking place) or if you are hearing the "Click of Death" (Google It) or if you can access Storage a hard drive test reports an error code that formatting alone does not cure.

Here is the Data Sheet Information
Optimised for high-definition consumer DVR applications
* Low power, quiet hard drives fine tuned for consistent, dependable delivery
of multiple high-definition video streams with capacities from 250GB to 4TB
* Designed to meet Energy Star and other strict consumer power consumption
standards
* Quiet drive operation to enhance customer viewing and listening experiences
* Easy-to-manage multi-room video delivery of up to 16 simultaneous
HD streams
* Qualified for operating temperatures up to 75°C to meet the rigours of the
consumer electronics set-top box market
* 24×7 operational profile to meet the always-on demands of the DVR market

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