Beginning to wonder if Humax are cutting corners on component quality. My HDR just blew up.

I left the room it was working. Came back and the screen was blank. Replaced the fuse. The LCD came on "Booting" but was flickering then died and the fuse was blown again. Did this for several fuses.

Was warm around the power supply area with a smell of electrical burning so I strongly suspect a component on the mains to 12v conversion board.

Sighs.

Ouch. Have you made any modifications to it such as installing a larger hard drive?

This is electronics. Things do fail its part and parcel of life. What matters is how its resolved and how quickly to get you back up and running.

Its better it fails now rather than the day after your warranty ran out.

Yeah but I put in a proper HDR drive not a high power pc alternative so all within normal power spec. All reversed now.

Yes you're right of course, but you wouldn't normally expect power caps to fail after 6 months. Most pc supplies I've had have been still working 8 years down the line and my pc's on for up to 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. Sign something isn't quite wrong on the quality front unless of course its a total one off.

Unless you remember the phrase, ' This warranty is not intended to replace or override your normal consumer rights'.

It would be interesting to know the answer to the question asked by Richard though, if only as a warning to others, have any modifications been made?

Edited:-
Sorry, I missed the post about the bigger hard drive.

Bad luck with the failure, White-Knight.

Did you have to remove a warranty sticker to open the box?

Rgds.


Les.

Yes but I got it back.

No worries anyway, despite being 6 months old my retailer offered me a brand new box, so no repair needed.

That's good.

Are you going to put the 1TB HDD in, or leave it as is for a while?

Rgds.

Les.

I'm going to leave it for a while.

Maybe try usbing it. Does anyone know, can I record HD with the HD attached via usb?

You can copy HD to an external USB HDD, but not record anything directly to it. (unless you connect it directly using the esata mod).

Rgds.

Les

Oh well might be going back in then.

I'll just double check the power draw to make sure before re-fitting.

Deleted as Duplicate.

I've just checked the power specs for anyone interested.

Original Hard Drive:

5v

0.375A

12v

0.290A

Replacement Hard Drive

5v

0.70A

12v

0.55A

So technically the replacement has twice the power consumption although in reality we're talking around 200mw difference on a unit with a 2.5A output rated supply.

I would think its highly unlikely the replacement would cause the PSU to fail therefore unless Humax have absolutely specc'ed it to the upper limit to start with. Again I would have thought this unlikely and if you were to add a CAM Card, I would have thought the consumption of that would equal the difference.

To be safe I might use an external caddy this time around and run a SATA from inside the casing but I don't think the power difference should affect anything.

I don't suppose BobCat will want to comment with this being a modification but maybe he could perhaps confirm power limits whilst saying that mods are not approved?

Of you fit the drive in an external esata cradle it has it's own power supply so the foxsat does not power the drive at all.

Should have read 200 milliamps not milliwatts.

What is the replacement hard drive you are using WK?

Western Digital:

WD10EVCS 1TB

OK so it is one of the WD specific PVR drives- as you say, that is still a very small amount of power the drive is using- do you know what the wattage of the power supply in the HDR is?

The output side of the HDR board says 2.5 Amps out.

Given the climb in consumption is only a little over 200 milliamps, I think it highly unlikely it would make any difference. After all, what happens if you put a CAM in the slot, surely that uses 200 ma and that's even assuming the power supplies output is at the absolute limit to start with. I'd be very surprised if the power supplies didn't have headroom as PSU's tend to be hot and inefficient at their limits.

Possibly just a random failure, it happens once in every few thousands units. It's statistics, anything mass-produced has a finite failure rate and each component contributes toward that rate. We could perhaps produce a product that had a lower field failure rate but then prices would increase and a balance must be struck. Some products will last forever, others will fail at the factory (as per the bell curve) the majority will last for many years (yes, we do aim for well beyond the warranty).

The new drive might have contributed, the mains supply of the house might have contributed, or a component might have randomly failed due to manufacturing tolerances. That is why we have the warranty! What I can of course say is that the fact that the drive drew double the power could be a significant factor and strictly it should perhaps not have been replaced. I don't know the expected designed power draw of a drive for this unit, but I am glad that for your satisfaction it was replaced for you. I note from the supply chain that second generation large capacity drives of the same type we currently use in our PVRs actually consume less power than the current generation of drives and this would help with lifespan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_failures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_process
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_system

Thanks for the reply Bob.

I think to be safe I'm going to use an external housing this time and just run a sata cable out from the main board connector, that way there's no additional power demand on the Humax. I can't see why the replacement drive would have caused a failure when properly fitted but as you say.

Only good thing is the retailer let me take out a 3 year extended warranty as well despite being 6 months from purchase. That's what you call service!

New box and a 3 year warranty (£30).

BTW the house mains should be OK. Its only a few years since we had a complete re-wire and the entire mains supply system is on double pole RCD's that monitor not only earth but live feedback as well so its a very highly protected system when it comes to shorts or surges or any form of instability.

Don't suppose you could let the new drive model manufacturer and model number slip could you Bob? Might save potential problems if people knew which drive had been tested to work within Humax boxes.