Someone on AV has installed a WD10EURS with advanced Format without problems - I have asked him to let us know if any arise - but currently all looking good.

It would be interesting to see what the partition starts & sizes are. The Advanced Format disks use 4k byte sectors instead of 512 byte sectors, so for best performance, the partition starts should be on 4k boundaries with size a multiple of 4k. Also the OS should do reads/writes as multiples of 4k (Linux will do that so the HDR is probably OK). I believe the drives will work in a 512 byte environment, but with reduced performance.

Not quite off-topic (as the subject is HDD upgrades) The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Samsung are selling their HDD division to Seagate.

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-...19-705958.html

I was considering the EURS as an upgrade but was concerned that the cut-down Linux on the Foxsat-HDR might be a pre-AF drive compatibility version, so unable to natively handle the 4k sectors.

Reading up, allowing the drive to convert from 512 to 4k, the performance hit could be dramatic; and as I then found someone selling the EVDS at a bargain price (just pence more than the EURS) it then became a 'no brainer' to go the well-tested route.

I'm still interested to know how the AF drives perform in the Foxsat though!

If I were going to use one, I would format it up on a Linux system first rather than letting the Humax do it. I thought I might have the opportunity of trying this a few days ago, upgrading a friend's Humax, but in fact he had bought a WD10EVVS which still has 512 byte sectors.

Just realised - WD10EVVS only has a 8Mb cache - hope that's good enough for 2 HD recordings and a HD playback at the same time!