Hi Folks,
My first post on forum and thank you to all for the invaluable advice I'd had from reading this forum since I bought my first Foxsat-HDR back in 2009. I now have two of these and 2 FoxHDR-T2's and have upgraded 3 of them with larger HDD's.
One of the Foxsat-HDR boxes was upgraded with a 1TB HDD - a Samsung HD103UJ - back in 2018. Although not ideal as it's not a AV rated drive, it was a spare drive from an old computer and lasted well until Christmas Eve when the box refused to boot. What a time to go! It displayed an error message something like "HDD is not formatted. Formatting will start". As I wanted to keep the old recordings I powered off and did not format the disk.
So, after reading the forums, it was 50/50 whether to go for the latest Seagate Skyhawk model (ST1000VX013) or the latest WD Purple model (WD11PURZ).
In the end I bought the ST1000VX013 from ebuyer for £46 and it arrived the next day.
Installed new HDD in Foxsat box and powered on. Box said something like "HDD not recognised".
After reading forum comments I downloaded SeaChest tools from the SeaGate website and used the
--phySpeed 2
option to reduce the maximum speed from 6 Gbps to 3 Gbps. This was done using an Inateck USB3 to SATA docking station. It was questionable whether this would work in a docking station but it did work, although when I read the parameters back using the SeaChest "-i -d" it incorrectly showed 6 Gbps (and cache size 256MB, instead of 64MB according to HDD data sheet). I think this is a limitation of using a USB3 to SATA device rather than just connecting directly to SATA, which is what I ended up doing later to run GParted.
I then installed the new HDD into the Foxsat and it was now recognised and allowed me to format it (""HDD is not formatted. Formatting will start"). I needed to reboot twice before the correct capacity was shown on the Foxsat - after the first boot it said 0GB used and 0GB free rather than 900GB-plus free.
I eventually managed to copy the existing recordings from the Samsung HD103UJ using a Gparted live CD on a spare computer, but not using the usual method of copying a partition. I tried this and before it starts copying it does a fsck to check for file system errors. There were so many errors that after several hours I abandoned this and instead mounted the /dev/sda3 partition into /home/sda3 and on the new ST1000VX013 drive mounted /dev/sdb3 into /home/sdb3 etc and did a recursive file copy using cp with -a switch (archive) to preserve all file attributes (timestamps, permissions etc). It did take a long time - left it on overnight - but in the end all files copied with no errors.
Installed new HDD in Foxsat and everything working ok. All previous recordings play ok.
With hindsight I might have gone for the WD11PURZ disk and just used a jumper to restrict speed to 3 Gbps.
Hope someone finds this helpful.
