1 TB SATA Hard Drive Upgrade Options

[run088]

AHHH CRAP!!

Well, I got the replacement Samsung HD. As soon as I started to transfer my stuff from my old HD I started having problems! Freezing during transfers and slow/no boots.

I'm pretty sure that it is only a problem with the HD's themselves. I cannot return the drive for another Brand/Model so I am stuck getting it exchanged AGAIN.

Well at least Newegg makes this painless for me with free shipping and friendly service.

So now I have to wait for another replacement drive and hope that it won't crap out on me right away. Then I get to worry about it crashing some time over the next year and losing all my stuff. GREAT!!

This whole upgrade has gone so well!! Screw you Samsung!! I used to trust you!

BTW, I was running this replacement drive on the new SATA adapter I bought from Ebay.

I think your psu is dying if you eliminated the trace damage on the 1.1 and the issue is the same this is common I have seen this many times it was the first thing I thought when I started reading your last couple post.
I never had an hdd act like yours Ive had them put no audio or video out and had them throw errors but never send the xbox in a coma
If the xbox does not respond to anything it is almost always the psu or it could be trace damage from the pcb board to the pic16 or the pcb board itself on model 1.6 it usually is a collector that goes bad there is a tut here about it.

[BigPotty]

Ok. So I decided to test the drive a bit more before sending it back. Newegg gave me 7 days for the RMA.

I was planning to reformat the drive and just send it back, but when I went into my X3 live setup to do the format I decided to change the LBA option.

Now don't get me wrong here, I have changed this option several times while doing this whole SATA HD upgrade. And normally I would leave it on the option for an F and G drive.

Anyway, I just decided to try and change it to F and G drive again this time before I did the reformat. Well, what do you know, the damn thing decides to work now. Unfortunately not 100% though.

BUT, I did leave it on for over 8 hours copying (by FTP through PC) about 300 gigs of stuff over from my other HD which was in a borrowed Xbox.

It went through all of this with no problem. I left it on while I slept and when I woke up it was locked up with the HD LED on solid. Damn.

I've been randomly booting, rebooting, shutting down, playing games and leaving it running for the last couple days. It seems like it's ok now. But who the hell knows? I hate this! Now I'm considering building another Xbox just so I have a proper backup of it. Another $150 or so. Yeah I can afford that. (Yeah right).

It would be nice for my car though! LCD, new head unit with Aux input, maybe a new sub and amp. I think I need another job.

Maybe none of this is even worth the trouble! But I feel so commited now!

And yeah, I looked over the SATA adapter I got off of Ebay and the soldering looked pretty bad. I cleaned it up a bit, but doesn't seem to make a difference. Didn't notice any solder on the chip though. Maybe I need a stronger magnifying glass.

BTW, thanks to all those offering suggestions! And may I suggest, if you have this working well with NO problems maybe you could share some details about your setup?

[run088]

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out 3 hdds later that the hdd may not be the problem.
My guess as I said is the problems you have are signs of a dying psu most of the time or the traces as I said but if you dont want to listen you can continue sitting around with your broken xbox.
Do I have to send you one that I have laying around that acts the same way to prove this before you put any stock in it or do you really not want to fix it at all?
By the way it is not uncommon for the xbox to freeze on that big of transfers just boot it back up and continue transfering it will be fine.

[BigPotty]

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out 3 hdds later that the hdd may not be the problem.
My guess as I said is the problems you have are signs of a dying psu most of the time or the traces as I said but if you dont want to listen you can continue sitting around with your broken xbox.
Do I have to send you one that I have laying around that acts the same way to prove this before you put any stock in it or do you really not want to fix it at all?
By the way it is not uncommon for the xbox to freeze on that big of transfers just boot it back up and continue transfering it will be fine.

Thanks for your suggestions run088. I'm in fact only on the 2nd HD. I have not yet decided to send it back as I'm still testing it. The freeze up was not during the file transfer. Maybe I wasn't completely clear in my last post about that. 300 gigs of file transfer went just fine. Then I left it on over night (IDLE) and when I woke up it was frozen.

I only suspect the hard drive due to the large amount of complaints about this particular model in the customer reviews on Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductRevie...False&Page=


I don't disaggree with you however that my power supply or motherboard could also be the problem. In fact it could be the SATA adapter too. Or some combination of all 4 components.

The problem is that this is only an intermitant thing and I have no way of isolating any aspect specifically.
Maybe you could give me some advice about testing my power supply? I have multimeters but don't know the first thing about how these power supplies work.

Thanks again for your assistance!

[Bomb Bloke]

Picked up a SATA 750gb Samsung of my own to play with... Including the adapter and all postage costs, came to about $160AU.

The adapter was some cheap no-brand Korean thing. Has a jumper diagram to set master/slave etc but no actual pins in the jumper points. Plus both sets of jumpers have the same name (JP0) whereas the jumper diagram lists a JP0 and a JP1 as well... So yeah, really cheap. Eventually worked out that it's set to master by default (other then the chart on the circuit board there was no documentation included at all).

Plugged it in and my X2 5035 sits on the Live Config Loading screen for a few minutes, goes to a black screen for a few minutes, flubbers, sits on the XBOX screen for a few minutes, and then finally goes to an error 14 (takes about a quarter hour to get there all up).

EvoX M8+ flubbers right away then sits on the XBOX screen. Couldn't be bothered waiting to see if it eventually went to an error.

Plugged it into a PC and... works fine. Hooked it up on primary master, DVD drive on secondary master, XBoxHDM quite happily formatted and installed a dash and so forth. Stuck it back in the console but it acted the same way as before.

Stuck it in the PC again (PC's own HDD on primary master, SATA drive on secondary master, DVD on secondary slave), formatted with NTFS successfully and played Sonic 3 & Knuckles off it (love that game).

So I'd say the adapter is functioning, and the jumper settings must be ok, but for whatever reason the console still isn't happy with it. Guess I'm stuck with my 320gb Seagate for a while longer.

[BigPotty]

Bomb Bloke: I'd suggest trying some other jumper settings including 2 jumpers and no jumper and possibly even changing the orientation of them. I believe the Xbox likes "Cable Select" best. Or, if you're so inclined, you could try getting a different adapter. What brand of HD did you use?


Currently waiting on my 3rd 750gig Samsung drive to be delivered. After a lot of testing and moving files back and forth, the second one finally died. And it was working pretty well too. I'd say properly booting about 95% of the time and occasionally my F partition would be "missing". A reboot would bring it back though. Definately tollerable. Oh well.

Same as the first one, it started the "click of death".

This one was used with a different model of SATA adapter than the first one.

Thanks to Newegg for providing me another free shipping label for the return.

[Bomb Bloke]

Bomb Bloke: I'd suggest trying some other jumper settings including 2 jumpers and no jumper and possibly even changing the orientation of them. I believe the Xbox likes "Cable Select" best. Or, if you're so inclined, you could try getting a different adapter. What brand of HD did you use?

The X-Box expects the drive to be in the Master position, so that should've worked. I gave Cable Select a go anyway but it didn't make a difference. Thanks for the suggestion though. I imagine the drive just isn't initialising fast enough for the system's liking, I don't hear the drive head start to move until a few seconds after it's powered up.

As mentioned, the drive is a 750gb Samsung - in fact I see it's the same design as yours. The exact model is HD753LJ.

I'm planning on a computer upgrade shortly, so I'll probably stick the thing in that then re-instate my LAN. If I shift all my media off the console my old 320gb drive would still provide plenty of space to play with.

This post has been edited by Bomb Bloke: Jul 7 2008, 06:02 AM

[run088]

This is what I got it seems to work pretty good so far but it is a little buggy.The mobo does not always access the hdd quick enough causing an error 13.I figured this because the ini of the 5035 does not always get picked up it mostly never really does the hdd just kicks in at the last second and it is normally bypassed.It acts the same way on 4981 as it does 5035 I can just see what is happening because of the ini of the 5035.
Here is what I am using

http://shop3.frys.com/%7B1LDPmH3q2l42WpesC...CH:MAIN_RSLT_PG



http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...N:IT&ih=009

[Bomb Bloke]

That appears to be the exact same adapter I'm using, right down to the QC Passed sticker on that big IC... Only mine didn't come in any real sort of packaging, it was just entombed in bubble wrap (probably to cut down on postage costs).

You see in one of the corners how there's a white square with four solder points in it? Yeah, that's the "jumpers".

Given that your 1TB drive works at all I'd pin the blame on the Samsung. Shoulda known it was too cheap to be worth while.

[run088]

That appears to be the exact same adapter I'm using, right down to the QC Passed sticker on that big IC... Only mine didn't come in any real sort of packaging, it was just entombed in bubble wrap (probably to cut down on postage costs).

You see in one of the corners how there's a white square with four solder points in it? Yeah, that's the "jumpers".

Given that your 1TB drive works at all I'd pin the blame on the Samsung. Shoulda known it was too cheap to be worth while.

Thats not the price I paid it was on sell last week $159 free shipping.

It might have something to do with the speed of the 32mb buffer.It seems at some points the drive is moving faster than it normally does.The way it flew there a slayers build of the hdd was quite impessive.
The adapter came in a nice package but the work done on it was shotty to say the least.It has a solder bridge on it that may or may not suppose to be there and there is a couple solder splashes on the board.

It does seem to be holding up so far.I have not loaded much media to it yet because I need to find out a little more about how the debug bios operate with hdd size and limitations first.

[BigPotty]

So I received my second replacement hard drive a couple of weeks ago. I'd been so busy lately that I haven't had much time to install and test it. But, I finally got around to getting it in and copying everything over from my old drive again. It all went ok with just a couple minor snags.

One thing that I'd found after having this drive in my computer for a day is that it was running pretty hot. My computer is pretty high end and definitely pumps out some heat but I'm getting the feeling that this model of Samsung drive has some temperature issues.

So I'm thinking that when you have it locked up inside the Xbox, it's really not getting a whole lot of airflow and the excessive heat eventually causes the "click of death" failure.

What fan speeds is everyone running at? What's your minimum? Is there a utility for the Xbox that will show the SMART info for a drive so that I can keep tabs on it's health?

It would be great if the Xbox (XBMC) could control fan speed in relation to drive temp in addition to CPU temp. This is how I have my PC configured.

So for now I'm just running my Xbox without it's cover on. Probably not the best solution, but I really don't want to lose another drive and have to go through the whole RMA hassle again.

Maybe it's a good time for a fan mod?

Comments, thoughts, suggestions appreciated!

[Bomb Bloke]

I've heard it mentioned that running the console with the cover off can mess with the airflow over the motherboard (resulting in graphics IC meltdowns).

Perhaps if you chopped a hole in the thingy the HDD is screwed into, so that the CPU fan is blowing air right into the drive?

[Thracx]

Thanks to all thread participants for the information! I have been happily using my Xbox with a WD 120GB PATA hdd for years, but have recently been thinking about getting a bigger hard drive so I don't have to FTP/SMB share out files from my PCs (i.e. I don't need all those videos wasting my RAID10 space!). Most of the information in Xbox-Scene is old and so only talks about hard drives as big as 320GB, so it's good to hear that larger drives could work.

I don't want to have to worry about the SATA-PATA adapter, unless we get more definitive posts in this thread soon. Hence, I'm planning on ordering the largest PATA drive that I can - 750GB is the largest I've seen.. but I may settle for 500GB, as I've been a very happy WD-only customer since 30GB drives were considered huge . I'll post any problems, or my success, as it happens.

This post has been edited by Thracx: Jul 31 2008, 04:48 PM

[Eksyte]

Aside from allowing extremely large drives, is there any benefit to using a SATA drive? Is there an increase in load/access times?

[chiribomb]

been gone for awhile and glad to see others still going on the xbox1.


Here my old thread from 06
hd

I havent read this whole thread yet but since fry's have 1tb for 159 i might try it