Sky + HD Box - What to do with your old one?

This week we have come across an old Sky+ HD set top box. It was heading for the scrap pile so this got us thinking, what else can we do with it? A quick eBay search revealed that by the time we subtracted postage cost and fees we would be lucky to get £10 for it.

we knew it had a hard drive but had no idea what size, manufacturer or form factor. Time for the tools and some HARDWARE HACKING!

Turns out the machine features a Seagate Pipeline HD .2 Hard drive. This is a 5900RPM 3.5" SATA drive with 16MB Cache.


We tear the box apart, remove the hard drive and pop it in our HDD dock to format and benchmark the drive, its not the fastest drive at 42MB/s Read / 43MB/s Write but when tested against an off the shelf, iOmega USB 3.0 2.5" external hard drive we found the Seagate to be over 40% faster READ and 60% faster WRITE. - Definitely a good drive for backup/ file storage.

Not an easy task filming with one hand and hardware hacking with the other but we got there in the end... Let us know your thoughts.....