Hi Nigel, welcome to the 'Dead Humax HDR-1000 hard drive Society'.
I joined this popular club last year and, like many others, went through all the same options/questions as yourself and received on this forum similar helpful advice as you have.
I didn't exchange the unit right away as I was hanging on to my 1Tb of unaccessible recordings but finally, after a suitable period of mourning, bit the bullet and gave Humax my £55 and a nice new/refurbed HDR-1100S arrived the other day. I was on here searching for DLNA help and saw a familiar thread title re. lost recordings.
As far as I know Humax stopped repairing this hard drive 'known issue' as the repairs often failed at a later date.
In desperation I turned my unit off for weeks but it never recovered so you were one of the lucky ones.
I contacted Humax early December to do the exchange but they only swap units with the same hard drive size and mine was 1Tb and they had none of this size in their refurb stock so I had to wait. I called back weekly and then asked if they could send me a 500Gb unit on loan for the festive season but 'computer said no'. They then said they would call me when a 1Tb unit was in stock, but they didn't. I called on 4th Jan and they said they had plenty so I paid the £55 and now have an HDR-1100S which is working fine so far.
It is an improvement as being wireless I can get rid of the ethernet cable to the router. The remote control is slightly different which takes a bit of getting used to.
The courier brings the new refurb unit and takes away your old box in exchange. As well as a like-for-like hard drive size swap I think it also has to be the same colour as well.
If it is possible that your unit may or may not die in the near future you might want to consider watching all the stored programs and then doing a £55 exchange before you get too far out of the warranty. If you get an understanding engineer on the helpdesk they may agree to an exchange before the unit fails again if you explain what happened. The refurb units only come with 6 monhs warranty I think. The original units had a 2 year warranty but I feel Humax are being pretty generous with their exchange policy (they can date the unit from it's serial number so you can discuss this with them) as mine was probably 2.5 years old and there was no issue.
Hope your unit goes on for years but thought I would let you know my experience as this forum has been so helpful to me.
As the Humax guru Graham has mentioned there is a suspicion that the Humax app may have been the culprit as it was the first question the engineers asked me. My old unit had the app configured and the hard drive used to crank up all the time every few minutes when the box was off. I deleted the app but, unbeknown to me, it remained on the box and the drive continued to fire up all the time and this constant stop/start may have caused early drive failures although I thought it was something on the control board. Whatever the cause it might be best for reliability, certainly on the 1000 model, to turn off the app as my new box just sits quietly and the drive doesn't constantly start up when the unit is off. Good luck anyway.
| Wed 10 Jan 2018 23:33:28
#24 |