# upgrading hard drive in dvd player/recorder



## joe56219 (Aug 9, 2006)

I have a polaroid dvd player/recorder with a hard drive. I wish to upgrade the hard drive and it should be just a simiple replacement of the existing hard drive with another IDE one. I was wondering if the new hard drive needed to be initialized in some way before putting it into my recorder. The recorder is a Polaroid DRM-2001G


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## etaf (Oct 2, 2003)

Yes ,you would need to format it to the format system the DVD player requires - they should be instructions on how to do that 
Some PVRs will automatically format
Also some PVRs the firmware will only support upto a certain size, so a larger Harddrive may not work, 
also they sometimes use thinner drives and lower heat versions

I will see what information is available on the device

how big is the harddrive you currently have ?


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## joe56219 (Aug 9, 2006)

My current hard drive is an 80 Gig.


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## etaf (Oct 2, 2003)

I can not find any details online about the device , I suspect it may not support higher capacity drives. It may support a 160GB drive but no guarantee. 
A lot of devices came out with 80GB HDD and very soon after 160HDD were available.

If you take the device apart and look at the current HDD and see what the make and model is - you should be able to see if you can then find a replacement - I suspect it maybe a slimline drive , but thats a guess

Why did you want to upgrade - is it faulty or was it to achieve a higher capacity ?


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## joe56219 (Aug 9, 2006)

I am just looking for more memory to store movies on. I actually did find a forum discussion that talks about connecting an external hard drive to the player and even an external optical drive. It is a pretty old message thread, 2007, but this is a pretty old player. They said that they had luck using HDD upto 250Gig, but had difficulty above that. If you are interested the forum is AVSforum.com and the thread is "Is an external HDD possible w/ a DVDR?"


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## etaf (Oct 2, 2003)

do you want to post the actual link

using a 250GB external HDD maybe the way to go

edit
found it here
http://www.avsforum.com/t/736151/is-an-external-hdd-possible-w-a-dvdr


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## joe56219 (Aug 9, 2006)

http://www.avsforum.com/t/736151/is-an-external-hdd-possible-w-a-dvdr


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## joe56219 (Aug 9, 2006)

The project seemed pretty simple, but as they were getting deeper into making improvements, I was getting a bit lost. If you go through the discussion, maybe you can tell if they had a way to connect several drives into the system at once, or if they were just swapping drives in and out. The actual discussion was about 8 yrs old, maybe there is some new technology that could avoid having to swap drives.


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## etaf (Oct 2, 2003)

looks like you can just replace the 80gb for upto 500gb , although later in the first page there is some issue mentioned

did you want to setup multiple drives or just do a simple replacement ?

also the new cable failed
http://www.avsforum.com/t/737318/ide-cables-and-hdd-upgrades#post_8669998

the cable also appears to need modification
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=9180231&&#post9180231


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## joe56219 (Aug 9, 2006)

I was looking for a straight replacement, but the idea of putting the hard drive outside the recorder gave me some interest, especially if the machine would only take 250 Gigs. Having the drives outside would make it possible to increase the storage just by swapping drives, not practical with HDD inside the machine. It would be even greater if it was possible to daisy chain drives in a master/slave config, or hook up drives in a box that make swapping without pulling one drive and replacing with another.
I will probably just do a straight replacement, and save the external setup as a project to work on later.


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