[mpardee]

Hi everyone. I received the following email the other day and wondered what everyone thought of it. I tried replying to the sender but I received a non delivery message to that address. (I received it because I host the Hard drive upgrade instructions at www.blindsquirrel.org/UTV ).


Here's the message:

I just exchanged the 40 Gb Samsung drive out of my SONY Ultimate TV box after it failed. Apparently the drives fail because SONY Ultimate TV boxes are never supposed to be turned OFF and ON. You are always supposed to leave them ON because their architecture permits surges of power to reach the drive every time you turn it on and off, eventually causing it to crash as mine had done. I obtained this information after talking to SONY Technical support. Since my Ultimate TV box was out of warranty, I searched the web and found your sight with the super easy method to exchange the drive. I bought a Western Digital 7200 rpm 250 Gb drive. I Formatted it NTSF, then installed it in my Ultimate TV box. I hooked the unit back into my system and the phone line. When it turned on it connected to WebTV and downloaded a 297 packet upgrade that it says takes 110 minutes to download. When it was finished I called Direct TV and had my service turned back on and the unit worked perfectly. I now have 200 hours of record time! Thanks to all the information posted on your site, I now have the ULTIMATE TV device!


I will leave out the person's name, but his initials were S.M. I tried to reply to his email about the 137GB limitation (or was it 127) and to get more info and steer him towards this forum, but I received the NDR from his address.


What's everyone think? Can this be valid? If so, how? I didn't think the controller was capable of handling drives this large.

 

[extremis]

Not to be a pessimist, but I think the dude is mistaken!!

 

[rxman]

max record time is approx 115 hrs using 137gig of a 160gig drive

and approx 105 hrs using a 120 gig drive. testing was to proceed for

using an external drive via usb port but never developed much beyond

that

 

[watching]

Maybe something changed in the software afer the 1/12/04 update that allows us to exceed the previous 137Gb limitation.


Michael, when did you receive the orginal communication?

 

[mpardee]

January 16th.

 

[cyberbob25]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that 137GB limitation a limitation in the firmware, not the OS?

 

[lgodavid]

hi,


The 137GB Limit is propably in the hardware...


However, a software workaround might allow for larger drives.


If anyone does a hard drive (160GB+) upgrade it shouldn't be too hard to verify larger drive support.