Replacement Sky+ HD box

[ey143]

wow selling an old technology box at the price, good luck, even with the 39% off.

I ended up buying off amazon a refurb for £32 with prime delivery for the 500gb version. I figure to buy it without the hard drive is as expensive if not more or the box looks ancient.

https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07DRQL2HX/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Is there a way to deactivate the hard drive in the software settings so it stops powering up and making noise and burning the few watts of energy?

 

[Sureitsoff?]

Lucid will know

 

[RandomGrinch]

Is there a way to deactivate the hard drive in the software settings so it stops powering up and making noise and burning the few watts of energy?

I don't know about an option to disable the HDD. But, if you want to maintain the same functionality and want something quieter, I believe it is straightforward to replace the HDD with an equivalent SATA SSD.

 

[Lucid]

Making Sky+HD boxes 'diskless' isn't something I've ever had enough call to do to make it worthwhile spending any time on.

The standard advice is that a Sky+HD box won't work without a drive. The reason is the EPG. The hard-drive is used to store the 7-day planner. It's said that certain models of Sky+HD box will work without a HDD, but I don't know if that means they lose the EPG too. AFAICT in this thread it's the EPG that's the main requirement since the lady concerned knows her way around it.

I suppose for someone with the spare time to go trawling car boots and the Facebook selling groups / FreeCycle etc and dealing with a few dozen boxes a week as a little side-line to a paying job then there's a reasonable chance of coming across the suitable boxes. For me as a jobbing installer though, the chances of finding (1) a person who wants this and (2) who happens to own the correct model of box, and (3) is happy to spend the money for a callout to do the work, and finally (4) accepts that if Sky later changes the firmware/software then it could be rendered useless until a HDD is reinstalled.... well, there's very little overlap between the four elements.

A possibility is replacing the mechanical drive with a solid state unit. There'd still be the power consumption, but at least the noise and heat would be reduced.