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Sky Plus is a wonderful combined satellite receiver and PVR box. It has dual satellite tuners so you can watch a recording while recording two other channels at the same time. Nice.
For a long time my box has been having problems playing back channels whereby the video would stutter, jump back a few seconds, forward again, show lots of compression artifacts and generally be annoying. I put this down to the hard disk failing and some internet research backed this theory up. The box takes a standard IDE drive and many people upgrade it to 120G for 60 hours of recording. The basic box has a 40G/20 hour capacity. I have not really wanted to spend the money on fixing the problem as I am mean, the problem wasn't too bad just irritating and I'm not really interested in having more than 20 hours recording (do people sit down for 60 hour playback binges?).
Last night watching EastEnders the playback was particularly bad and was spoiling my wifes enjoyment. On a flash of inspiration I remembered I had a largish hard disk from my desktop pc going spare, one I stopped using because of a major corruption that nearly lost me my wedding photos. I checked it out and it is indeed a 40G drive, an IBM Deskstar IC35L040AVER07-0 for the record.
The satellite box satellite box uses torx screws and I had a torx screwdriver so I wasn't too worried about doing the swap. The torx screwdriver didn't fit very well and the screws holding the drive in would not budge. I snapped a drill drilling the old screws out. I put the new drive in and did a system reset and it all seems to be working.
Time will tell whether it has solved the original problem or whether using a 7200rpm drive with dubious reliability is going to introduce more problems. Anyway, it was worth a try as the disk was lying around anyway.
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