Humax DRT400 SATA & fan upgrade report

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Thought I'd report on my project to upgrade & quiet my noisy Humax DRT400 Series 2 Tivo DVD-R.

I'd upgraded to a 250GB drive a few months ago, but it was pretty noisy. Bought a new 500GB Western Digital WD5000KS, which has been widely reported (http://www.silentpcreview.com, http://www.endpcnoise.com) as the quietest drive around. Since its a SATA drive, and the Humax has an IDE interface, I also had to purchase the Rosewill SATA IDE Bridge RC-203 from http://www.newegg.com. The Rosewill device doesn't work with the drives native SATA-II 300, so I jumpered the drive to work at SATA 150.

To help dampen vibration from the drive, I got 8 rubber washers from Home Depot. Installed four 5/32" flat neoprene wahers between the new drive and its mounting bracket, and four 00 flat stem repair washers between the bracket and the motherboard.

The fan was starting to whine, so I bought a new 70mm AcoustiFan & a rubber fan gasket from www.quietpcusa.com. Draws a little less power than the old fan (0.08A vs 0.11A). The new fan even comes with rubber screws to further minimize vibration. One issue is the new fan has a three pin connector, but the motherboard has only two pins. However, the connector will fit -- make sure the pins on the motherboard line up with the red & black wires on the fan's connector. The third, white wire is for fan speed and can be left unconnected (fan will run at full speed, but its whisper quiet).

Attached the new drive to my PC and used the free Hitachi Feature Tool 2.04 boot CD to set the acoustic management setting on the new drive to 128, the quietest. Get it here: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Then I attached the old (secondary master hdc) & new (secondary slave hdd, jumpered to SATA-150, using Rosewill adapter) drives to my PC, and used the excellent http://www.mfslive.org boot CD to transfer all my saved programs & settings to the new drive.
Love the mfslive CD because it handles all LBA-48 issues, no jumping through hoops to use drives > 137GB.

commands I used:
backup -qTao - /dev/hdc | restore -s 256 -r 4 -fFzi - /dev/hdd
followed by
expandroot /dev/hdd

had to use the beta version of the mfslive CD because I needed the -f and -F options:
-needed to use the -f option to save my recordings
-needed to use the -F option because I noticed that the root partition had shrunk from 256mb to 128mb and boot partition has shrunk from 4mb to 2mb. (This happened a few months ago when I replaced the Humax's original 40GB drive with the 250GB drive I am now upgrading to 500GB.)
To see partition info use the command:
pdisk -l /dev/hdc

Everything works great, unit is much quieter, and capacity has been increased to 611 hours.

I can still faintly hear occasional hard drive seeks (nothing like before however) so I'm looking for sheets of self-adhesive sound-deadening material to attach to the inside of the Humax's case. I've heard AcoustiPack is good, but its pretty expensive so I'm looking for a cheaper alternative -- love to hear your suggestions...

A few photos:

 

Good luck, don't forget to jumper the drive to SATA-I (SATA-150), as the adapter won't work with SATA-II.

 

You never stated what brand and model of hard drive you got, so it's impossible for me to say.

The info should come with your drive (often its on a sticker attached to the top of the drive.)