New Hard Drive for 942

It was over a year ago that I was reading posts from someone that had an external drive housing to make it easy to swap his drives. $60 is low enough to get me interested. I see that price at a santechusa site. Could you post where you got yours?

Also - this 7y250m0 model isn't noisy is it?

Santech is where I bought my drive. The purchase went very smoothly.

The Maxtor drive seemed to be just as quiet as the WD.

Thanks - I just ordered one.

Interesting. I must say that opening up you 942 voids the warranty, blah, blah. but sounds cool that you found a way to get it back if the drive fails. $60 is pretty cheap and will get it back alive.

Good new:
Drive arrived quickly. No problem installing it and getting an empty 25 HD hours, or going back to the original drive. Just as scn101 described.

Bad news:
I guess I expected the drive to come with a SATA cable - all the other's I've purchased have (but they were "retail box"). I don't want to touch the seal on the existing drive, but rather take SATA outside. I had a spare SATA data and power cable, but the power is the regular 4 connector molex you'd see in a PC. 942 has an odd 5 connector with no wire in the 5th, so I had to use its 2" power connector. I guess I'll need to purchase a SATA to eSATA and external enclosure with its own power and fan.

Worst News:
Should have been obvious if I thought about it, but with the empty drive, there were 80 missing Timers. I didn't use the new drive for long as recordings were going to start soon. I'll need to write down the existing Timers to recreate on the new drive when I have more time.

I would connect both to Linux PC and copy files from first two partitions, then 942 should make cleanup new disk by itself

scn101 said:

The 942 booted and gave a hard drive corruption warning asking to reformat the drive. Hit "ok" and the 942 reformatted the drive and came up like new. Tested out just fine.

Click to expand...

How about a bigger HD, 500G or even 750G? Would they work?

P Smith said:

I would connect both to Linux PC and copy files from first two partitions, then 942 should make cleanup new disk by itself

Click to expand...

Care to write a small tutorial on how to do this for us non linux users?

P Smith said:

I would connect both to Linux PC and copy files from first two partitions, then 942 should make cleanup new disk by itself

Click to expand...

I wonder if connecting both drives to a Linksys NSLU2 would work also? Then you could map the drives in windows and move the files that way. Looks like I have some testing to do.

kspeters said:

Care to write a small tutorial on how to do this for us non linux users?

Click to expand...

After few months of thinking I recall Ghost could copy EXT2 or EXT3 partitions just fine; so you don't need any OS - use Ghost boot floppy or CD ( yeah, I know it will boot MS-DOS ).