What to do with your old SKY plus set top box?

So we were recently given a SKY set top box, for those outside UK/Europe SKY is the major UK sattelite TV provider, and recently there has been a big shift with people moving over to SMART TV with netflix and other streaming services so a lot of people have canceled their SKY subscription and are left with these boxes lying about. They don't seem to have much of a second hand value either because their is so many of them about.

The most common ones are the SKY PLUS HD box, these are the ones that support 1080p video and have an inbuilt hard drive so you can record your programs to watch later.

When we were given it our first thought was lets find out what size/spec hard drive it uses, does it use a standard PC based SATA drive? 2.5" or 3.5", so out came the tools.

This video was done as a quicky to answer the question many people all over the UK have... "what to do with your old one?!"

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The box in question...


and what we found inside! a 500GB Seagate Pipeline HD - Standard 3.5" size using standard SATA power and data connections it spins at 5900RPM and features 16mb of cache...


And how it peformed in an external USB 2.0 enclosure...