upgrade

A user on the digitalspy forums has successful upgraded the hard disk in his V+ box. The Poster known as jamjam has extended the recording time from 80 hours to an astonishing 400 hours.

The stock 160gb hard drive was replaced with a new Seagate 750GB Ultra IDE Drive (Model No. ST3750640A). From the forum discussion it appears that the upgrade was relatively straightforward, and simply involved physical removal the old drive and replacement with the new drive. Jamjam reported that on first boot the V+ box automatically reformatted the new drive without any user input - which has been working perfectly since. The only minor niggle is that the V+ menu only displays 80 hours of available space after upgrade, although this number only decreases to 79 hours after 5 hours have been recorded. It would seem that V+ calculates the number of free hours based on the percentage of free disk space.

Check out the details here.

Please note that V+ users do not own their V+ boxes. V+ boxes remain property of Virgin Media, therefore this is one of those ‘do not try this at home’ upgrades.

I’ve just upgraded the hard disk in my 2.2ghz MacBook Pro using the hard disk from a Western Digital 320gb Pocket Drive. The USB pocket drive is fitted with a 2.5″ 320gb WD Scorpio Hard Drive (WD3200BEVT).

The idea is to plug the pocket drive into the macbook pro, clone the existing hard disk to the attached usb disk, verify the usb disk by booting off of it and finally physically install the Scorpio Hard disk into the laptop. This takes all of the data and the operating system from your old hard drive, and puts it all on to a new bigger drive. Buying the WD3200BEVT as part of the WD Pocket drive is about £20 more than buying the disk alone, but it gives you an easy method of transferring your system to a new disk without reinstalling everything.

First Step: Make sure you repartition the Pocket drive first so that it has one partition and the GUID option is chosen (under options). Using disk utility I performed a restore of my current hard disk to the attached pocket drive. This clones the internal hdd to the external usb drive. The process took about two hours. I then booted off of the USB drive (system preferences -> startup disk) to check that the drive was working and held all of my data. Next I disconnected and disassembled the pocket drive, removed the WD3200BEVT hard disk and began taking apart my macbook pro with the help of the ifix-it guide and some YouTube videos.

I found it useful to print out the ifix-it guide and whilst following the step-by-step instructions I taped the screws to corresponding section (in the instructions) using masking tape. Using this method I was able to make sure that none of the screws were muddled up or lost, and I knew where to fit them during reassembly, simply by following the instructions in reverse.

The hard disk upgrade has been completely successful and I also took the opportunity to install 4gb of RAM.