Back in May we entered the world of High Definition gloriousness by upgrading our old Sky+ box to a nice shiny new Sky HD box.  Its a mighty fine piece of kit with an amazing picture quality, so good in fact that even Tracie commented on it.

Though, sadly, all this gloriousness comes at a cost!  The thing eats disk space.  There's at least four times more detail in the HD picture compared to Standard Definition TV so the the hard drive fills up pretty quickly.

Sky states that the HD box comes a 160gb hard drive.  This is in fact a lie!  There's actually a 320gb hard drive hidden away inside but half of it is reserved so that only Sky can use it (For Anytime stuff apparently, and no disabling Anytime doesn't get you this space back).

The good news is that there is an answer.  As Sky+ boxes, HD or not, use a normal hard drive it can easily be upgraded.

Opening the box

The instructions we followed were specific to our Amstrad DRX780UK-C box.  Even though the boxes look the same they are actually made by a number of manufacturers, each with a slightly different construction.  You can find instructions on how to upgrade hard drive for all machines here.

Getting at the hard drive was pretty easy. Undoing the 4 screws underneath, 1 at the back and a little bit of wiggling of the case and you have one naked HD box.

Then all you need do is undo the screws holding the little control pad on the top and remove the lid.

The hard drive is held in place by 6 retaining screws. Undoing those and disconnecting the red SATA lead and power lead and the hard drive is free to be removed.

Replacement Hard Drive

Some hard drives are better suited for Sky+ use than others so after careful research we choose a Western Digital 1 Terabyte (Yes 1000gb!) WD10EVVS hard drive which comes from a range of hard drives specifically made for use in things like Sky+ boxes.

Sadly you don't get to use all of the hard drive.  You have no choice but to sacrifice 160gb to the god of Sky just like the original hard drive had to.  But that does leave us with a not insignificant space increase of over 5 times the original.

Copy Plus

If you are doing this there's a very good chance that you will have recordings that you haven't got round to watching.  Luckily, there is a great bit of (free) software called Copy + that will copy programmes from one drive to another.  Full instructions on how to use Copy + can be found on the above website.

You do need some way of connecting the current hard drive to your laptop and to power it up and the advice on the Copy + website is to use a USB caddy.

There are several different caddies available and we went for a Sharktoon dual caddy.  Looking a bit like a toaster it can accept both 3.5" and 2.5" hard drives and allowed us to connect both the current and new drive to our laptop at the same time.

This meant we could transfer our recordings much faster going direct from the current drive to the new one.  A single caddy meant we needed to copy the recordings from the current drive to our laptop and then repeat that process to copy them from the laptop to the new drive.

Also, because of a quirk in the Sky HD boxes inner workings it cannot recognise hard drives over 500gb, but Copy+ does some special formatting, or something equally magic, to get round that problem.

Closing the box

Not surprisingly fitting the new hard drive is done by reversing the procedure used to get at the old one.

Once the HD box is back together and all the connections connected it was switched on. Like always when the power is restored it took a while to turn on. But once back on the Copy+ instructions stated it was a good idea to do a Planner Rebuild.

This requires you to access a hidden menu by pressing Services, System Setup, 0, 1, Select. Once there choose the Planner Rebuild option and let it do its stuff.

Results

We did have one problem when transferring a program but luckily Copy+ allows you to pick and choose which programmes get copied over, but other than that its a pretty easy process that just takes a while (ours took 75 minutes to complete)

However before this our HD box stated it had 47% free space.  Afterwards it said 91% free even though it had pretty much all the same programmes as before.  HD Films that previously took up 6% of space before, now take 2%.