Hello all,
I'm a new poster, I just found this board a few days ago. I'm looking forward to participating in the future with other members in the discussions.

I first saw the HSX-109 at the Las Vegas CES show in January, fell in love with it, and placed a pre-order for one shortly after that...

It arrived in February and I've been using it quite a bit. I really enjoy all the features it has to offer and I already have a couple of Rio receivers scattered around the house thanks to the free offer from the purchase and the Tiger $99 offer.

The only thing that I felt was lacking after using the unit for a few weeks was the size of the hard drive at 40 GB. The big dilemma, of course, is whether or not it's worth compromising the warranty to upgrade it. And what if a larger disk doesn't work somehow, etc?

I finally decided to take the plunge and thought I'd write about my experience to help others who may be on the fence about it. If this discussion is improper, I apologize... I just thought that others may be interested in hearing how it went for me before they decide to attempt an upgrade themselves...

The hard drive that was inside my unit was a Seagate ST340810A 40GB model, part of the U series. It was jumpered as a Master.

As a ReplayTV owner of the newest 4000 series, I'd read in the AVS forum about the on-board HD controller of the Replay TV only being able to handle up to a 128 GB (I understand this limitation is common to several on-board HD controllers. So I decided to play it safe and get a 120 GB hard drive for a more plug-n-play installation (hopefully) on my Audio Center. I wanted it to work the first time with no snags...

After searching around, I purchased a Maxtor D540X 4G120J6 120 GB drive from Jazz Technology (www.jazztechnology.com) for $170 plus shipping. I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer. It came in 2 days via UPS and was packed well.

Tonight I installed the drive. A couple of years ago, I tried to do an IDE HD clone job from a full HD to an empty unformatted HD and the results were less than desirable. I remember struggling with Master/Slave jumpers, etc. and didn't want to take any chances with my PC hardware and these two drives...

So I decided to rebuild the new drive from scratch and re-copy my CDs back onto it. Luckily I didn't have that many recorded on the hard drive because I thought I might do this upgrade...I didn't want to take the chance of connecting the old drive and the new drive to my PC IDE controller, etc. with the jumpering and cabling issues. Not to mention the drives are different brands, which has caused me some master/slave issues before.

So this is what I did....

I took the Audio Center apart, by undoing the 6 screws on the bottom. After gently taking the top off (you have to pry it a bit with your fingers), I was inside the box. The HD and CD are attached to a bracket assembly that uses 2 screws and a latch to hold the bracket and drives intact. The good news is that the old HD and the new one have the same screw holes, and the same power cable and data cable locations. So it's an easy replacement. Just don't forget your anti-static precautions!

After removing the IDE cable and the power cable from the HD/CD assembly to the motherboard, I was able to remove the bracket with the entire CD/HD assembly so I could work on it up close.

Next I took apart the data and power cables from the old drive, unscrewed it from the bracket, inserted the new (empty) HD, attached the old screws in the bracket where they lined up with the new HD, replaced the data and power cables and then re-attached the bracket to the base of the case. Now time for the smoke test...I powered it up with no problems...

The CD that ships with the Audio Center has a dual purpose. It will run in your PC and let you read documentation, install the Emplode software, etc. But when you insert the CD in the Audio Center with a new blank HD, it asks if you want to restore it to an "As New" state. That's for me, I thought...

So that's the option I chose, let it run while it copied the software over, the CDDB database, etc. When it was all done, it rebooted and came up as it did when I first plugged it in.

I re-entered my setup data, network data, and was off and running. The "About my Rio" menu choice scrolled down and said I had 112 GB free space, so I know that the unit is recognizing the new drive okay. I'm copying CDs to it as I write and I'm also streaming audio to my Rio receiver right next to my computer as well...It works!

That's about the size of it....If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them..It's not a difficult upgrade, just a warranty issue...And one more thing, be careful of the exposed power supply inside the cabinet...

I look forward to using the Rio Audio Center for a long time, it's great and one of the best purchases I've made in a long time....

Randy

Too cool. Thanks for the report!

Yeah, we had been told it would be very easy to upgrade the drive (just like you said, insert the CD and choose "Restore To As New"). Glad to hear it worked as planned.

The only questionable part is getting the old tunes copied from the old drive over to the new one, assuming you weren't willing to simply re-rip the CDs.

The tricky part is that there's only one IDE header on the unit, so if you want to copy the contents of one hard disk to the other, you have to disconnect the CD-ROM drive and do some tricky mounting/unmounting commands at the shell prompt.

Considering how easy this unit makes CD ripping, maybe it's easier just to re-rip the CDs.

How's the noise of the new drive compared to the old one?

Thanks, Tony...I've enjoyed your posts on this forum. The noise level is fine. In fact, I still have the lid off just to make sure that it is going to work. I've ripped about 10 CDs and I'm convinced that all is well. Even with the lid off, the unit is quiet. It may be even quieter than the old drive. But I'll put the cover back on soon and I'm sure it will be even quieter still...

Thanks, Randy

Pretty impressive for having just discovered this BBS days ago! Seems like you have quite the SB collection too! We just need to get you a RioCar and you'll be all set!

EDIT: If you have a digital camera, could you take come photos of the inside?

I was thinking about posting some photos last night, but didn't get around to it...Here's one with the CD and HD in place....

Randy

Randy, photos posted to these BBSes must be smaller than 100k in order to work.

Or he can email them to me! They are quite large...

Hmmm... looks like empty pads for two large chips in the "2nd quarter" (top left) of the main board as seen in the pics...
What can be added there?

Looks like the RAM to me. Not sure.

Okay, I'm back...Tonight I put the cover back on and snapped a few more photos before I closed her up...One thing I didn't mention above is that the circuit board is silk screened (C) 2000 Sonic Blue Rio Division and the TEAC CD-W58E CD-RW Drive (8x8x32) is dated March 2001. Did they plan to build and sell earlier but were held back for some reason (perhaps MP3 music industry stuff?)

Enjoy the photos...The first is a snap of the LCD showing the finished results. The second shows the "memory" chip positions and some jumpers that look interesting. The third and final photo shows a couple of the more interesting-looking surface mounted ICs...

Randy

Photo #2

Photo #3

The reason the circuit board is dated 2000 is because that's when it was designed. It takes a long time between initial design and final release on these things.

The reason the CD-R is dated 2001 is because these things have to be sourced, in quantity, pretty far ahead of time. They settled on a CD-R that they knew would work well, they could write code specifically for it, and it was easy to source in quantity.

Regading Photo #2...

Nobody try plugging anything into the pins labeled "Debug" in that photo. A separate piece of electronics (an actual sub-board) is required to be plugged in there. The alpha testers each got one of these debug boards, but the general consumer public won't have a simple way of plugging directly into it.

Hehe.. that set of pins next to the debug pins ("JTAG") look an awful lot like the embeded development interface we use at work. Our JTAG units are used for debugging all sorts of embeded platforms, so I assume the central is another such device.

The JTAG pins are only connected to the Cypress PLD device; they're used for in-circuit programming.

Hugo