How to upgrade your Sky+ hard disk

Sky+ boxes are incredibly user friendly but, as many people have found, the biggest drawback to all but the most recent Sky+ 160 boxes is the standard 40GB hard disk size.

This holds about 20 hours or so of TV and for many, especially families, this simply isn’t enough.

Although not recommended or endorsed by Sky, you can install a bigger hard disk, and the following workshop shows you how to upgrade a second-generation Pace unit. It also looks at some of the problems we encountered during the upgrade.

There are plenty of sites online with guidelines on this upgrade, and we read through a few before starting – including Morlocks, which we used for our initial research.

Before you begin, though you need to decide how big a disk you want to install. A very rough guide is that a 160GB disk will record around 80 to 100 hours of TV, and an 80GB will record around 40 hours.

Hard disks can be pretty noisy, so it’s also important to buy one with a reputation for silent or near silent running, and as we discovered with our first attempt, a faster spin speed may create more noise (see troubleshooting, below).

You can follow our simple workshop (see the picture gallery above) to perform this upgrade, which takes less than an hour to complete.

Finally, attempting this upgrade will invalidate your warranty, and Personal Computer World or its associated sites can’t be held responsible for any problems you encounter.

Troubleshooting
Initially we used a Hitachi Deskstar 160GB drive, which costs £53. Although it claims to be a quiet disk, it was definitely noisier than the 40GB Maxtor that it replaced. However, the noise was not so loud as to be annoying.

But we found this disk did not work properly in the box. Recordings suffered from frequent pixellation and freezing, and the box turned itself off several times.

Also, the fan continually spun because the disk required more cooling than the Maxtor it replaced. The original drive had a spin speed of 5,400rpm, while the Hitachi’s spin speed was 7,200rpm.

A search online found various forums talking about similar problems, with some suggested attempts to fix them, but none worked in our case.

So for this upgrade, we’d recommend you try the Seagate U Series 9 we’ve used, because it is optimised for such devices.

It’s still slightly noisier than the Maxtor, but with a 5,400rpm spin speed, the fan isn’t spinning continuously and pretty much the only time we hear it is when the TV is switched off but the Sky+ box is still on.

A good source to research if you want more information or hit a problem is the Digital Spy forum.