Western Digital 40GB hard drives for BR1600

[TheOtherEric]

Hi,
I used to be a lurker on BOSSBR.NET about 12 years ago but it seems to have changed a bit and my login id had to be re-registered.

Anyway, I re-registered because I thought someone might find this useful.

There seems to be some OEM Western Digital 40 GB hard drives available that fit the BOSS BR1600. Mine was going an bit wonky and I was surprised to see someone selling them.

I ordered 2 and they arrived today and I put one in and initialized it and it seems to work just fine, so far. They seem to be NOS (new old stock) OEM drives as they are still sealed in the mylar bags.

I found them here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00006HNZ1

I don't know how many are available but like I said I bought 2 to have one more spare for down the road. I think there might be 80 GB drives available too, but I just needed a 40 and a spare.

Thanks for reading and I hope this is useful information.

Eric

[bruno]

Great info. Thanks.
Never opened up my 1600 - is the disk pretty accessible and reformat pretty straight forward?
Often wondered if I could put at SSD into it, assuming I could get an SSD IDE drive :-)

B

[TheOtherEric]

Yes the disk is fairly easy to remove. I put the BR1600 upside down on a lint free towel and took the screws out of the bottom. There are a lot of them and I found that they don't all have the same thread size (at least in mine) so I taped them each by the hole that I removed them from with small pieces of masking tape so I knew where they'd go back.

When the back comes off the hard drive is over to one side and there are 4 bracket screws, two on each side that I removed. Two near the case and two down on the circuit board. I didn't have to remove the brackets once the screws were removed, I just moved the one towards the center a bit so the shock mounts on the drive could be taken out of the brackets.

Once the drive shock mounts (they look like little silicone rubber wheels that are screwed into the side of the drive) came out of the brackets I gently removed the power cable and the data cable from the drive, unscrewed the shock mounts and screwed them into the new drive, hooked up the cables and put the shock mounts back into the brackets and screwed everything back together.

When I powered on the BR1600 it said "disk error" when it booted up but I pushed the enter/yes button and the main screen came up. I then initialized the drive just like it says to do in the manual.

I am a really slow worker but it still took me only about 45 minutes to do the job and most of that time was trying to retrieve a screw that my fat fingers dropped inside when I was putting the drive back in, and of course, formatting the drive takes a few to several minutes.

Eric

[bruno]

Great info.
My disk on my BR1600 appears to be heathy so far - but have ordered one from amazon as a backup as IDE drives are getting more rare - ordering one from the US site to the UK was £22 delivered - so good to have one "just in case" ...

Cheers.
B