Liam1611
Inactive User
I was bored the other day and considering I don't have enough money to splash out on a 2.5" Hard Drive (as it's not an essential so the Mrs keeps telling me) and also risk overheating my clone DM800 I decided to have a go at modding my receiver so that it would work with a 3.5" drive. I've got a few 500GB 3.5" drives lying about and the knowledge so I thought I would give it a go.
On the Dreambox Motherboard there's a white power lead connector for the internal drive, the only problem is that there isn't a 12v supply for a 3.5", stupidly I thought it was just going to be a case of taking the lid off connecting the lead and plugging in the hard drive. Not a chance tried the above, connected the drive and it refused to spin up, Ok I thought time to get my meter out and start measuring voltages, there's a 5v rail but no 12v on the white 4 pin connector, so I started to look for a 12v rail on the Motherboard. There's a diode on the top left of the board close to where the power connector is located which has 12v, so I stripped the receiver down, flipped the motherboard over and soldered a wire from the 12v supply to the last pin of the connector on the underside of the board and then secured the wire in place with some insulation tape, rebuilt the receiver minus the modem, as it's no good because it isn't populated and connected the internal Sata lead because I had bought an eSata cable so that I could use the port for my 3'5" drive. The original cable that comes with the 800 has the Power and Sata cables combined, so I used a Junior hacksaw to cut the two in half and was left with a power lead and a very short Sata cable. Rebuilt my 800, connected everything up and whilst the lid was off I decided to connect my 128mb flash drive to the internal USB slot as it was being used as a swap file. Took the casing of the flash drive and it fitted in nicely, put the lid back on connected all the cables including the hard drive and plugged it in. Waited until the machine had booted and initialised and formatted the drive and all is working well. Pic's are included for anyone if they wish to do this themselves and save a few quid by using an old drive they have lying about. If your worried about having a bare drive lying about at the back of your receiver you could always buy a silicone enclosure similar to this [ame="http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/3-5-SATA-IDE-HDD-Hard-Disk-Drive-Silicone-Skin-Case-/160433568630?pt=UK_Computing_LaptopAccess_RL&hash=item255a95fb76"]one[/ame].
Regards
Liam
On the Dreambox Motherboard there's a white power lead connector for the internal drive, the only problem is that there isn't a 12v supply for a 3.5", stupidly I thought it was just going to be a case of taking the lid off connecting the lead and plugging in the hard drive. Not a chance tried the above, connected the drive and it refused to spin up, Ok I thought time to get my meter out and start measuring voltages, there's a 5v rail but no 12v on the white 4 pin connector, so I started to look for a 12v rail on the Motherboard. There's a diode on the top left of the board close to where the power connector is located which has 12v, so I stripped the receiver down, flipped the motherboard over and soldered a wire from the 12v supply to the last pin of the connector on the underside of the board and then secured the wire in place with some insulation tape, rebuilt the receiver minus the modem, as it's no good because it isn't populated and connected the internal Sata lead because I had bought an eSata cable so that I could use the port for my 3'5" drive. The original cable that comes with the 800 has the Power and Sata cables combined, so I used a Junior hacksaw to cut the two in half and was left with a power lead and a very short Sata cable. Rebuilt my 800, connected everything up and whilst the lid was off I decided to connect my 128mb flash drive to the internal USB slot as it was being used as a swap file. Took the casing of the flash drive and it fitted in nicely, put the lid back on connected all the cables including the hard drive and plugged it in. Waited until the machine had booted and initialised and formatted the drive and all is working well. Pic's are included for anyone if they wish to do this themselves and save a few quid by using an old drive they have lying about. If your worried about having a bare drive lying about at the back of your receiver you could always buy a silicone enclosure similar to this [ame="http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/3-5-SATA-IDE-HDD-Hard-Disk-Drive-Silicone-Skin-Case-/160433568630?pt=UK_Computing_LaptopAccess_RL&hash=item255a95fb76"]one[/ame].
Regards
Liam
roud:
