RNS-510 HDD replacement/SSD swap DIY

[Preen59]

VERY well documented. Very cool. Thanks, John!

[Corey_R]

It's not so you can listen to 128 days of music... it's so that you can listen to whatever you feel like listening to when you wake up in the morning

[johnc]

Well done John! It's good to see the threads like this one.

It is stickie.

Thanks. :thumb up:

Yeah, it's something I'd be interested in knowing too. My personal CD collection is 70GiB as VBR MP3's. So I'd be happy to do this mod and use a 128GB SSD even. But to spend that money, and then have it potentially auto partition with a 40GB map partition and 80GB music parition would be frustrating... or even worse, if the new firmware is paritioning in 3 and you only end up with half the space as mentioned above, then I still wouldn't have enough space for my entire collection, which makes this mod pointless.

Like i mentioned, the 64GB version is the only smart cost vs gain upgrade. The 128GB isn't worth the money (at least for now), and the space wasted by the auto partition is just too great. If there have been other FW hacks for video in motion, maybe we'll see partition resizing hacks. No idea.

If you've got 70GB+ which you always want at your disposal, an MDI is still the most practical upgrade. I've got 360GB+ of music, so it has to go on a USB drive. It's all kind of pointless though as that's 128 days of continuous music without repetition. I've not spent anywhere near that amount of time in my car in nearly 4 years of ownership! A decent and fast drive with your favourite albums along with a 32GB SDHC card is faster and more efficient than MDI.

[Idle]

As I said, I've yet to see one (don't do enough driving these days to be worth putting anything on my RNS HD.)

[johnc]

It's a proprietary format though. If you think you can tackle it, I'd love to hear how you get on with it. You'd be the first in the world to succeed and many have tried. That said, I've not thoroughly researched it, so there may have been some more recent progress.

[Idle]

I've not as yet looked at the hard drives used in the RNS510 so can't be certain if it would work (I'd expect it to,) but rather than doing a re-install my first thought when doing this would be to look at cloning the old drive to the new SSD and then adjust the partition sizes to suit.

There's no reason the map partition should ever exceed 10GB and very likely about half that would suffice.

There are free disk clone programs on the 'net (HD-Clone, for instance) that should cope, and the drives are small enough that even the late, lamented Partition Magic (still around in Torrent files, I think) should comfortably handle the task.

For those with a copy of Acronis Disk Director (usually under $50 online) the task should be a doddle.

[Corey_R]

What about after the fact? When the fw load has already setup the partitions?
Will have a play with the oem drive and report back.

Yeah, it's something I'd be interested in knowing too. My personal CD collection is 70GiB as VBR MP3's. So I'd be happy to do this mod and use a 128GB SSD even. But to spend that money, and then have it potentially auto partition with a 40GB map partition and 80GB music parition would be frustrating... or even worse, if the new firmware is paritioning in 3 and you only end up with half the space as mentioned above, then I still wouldn't have enough space for my entire collection, which makes this mod pointless.

[Transporter]

Well done John! It's good to see the threads like this one.

It is stickie.

[kamold]

What about after the fact? When the fw load has already setup the partitions?
Will have a play with the oem drive and report back.

[aussietig]

One question: has anyone tried resizing the partitions on the drive after its setup? Its annoying to have a ~20GB partition for <1GB of map data.

Don't think it can be done, since it's the FW that does the auto partition!

[kamold]

Finally got around to putting in my 64GB SSD last night.

Took me a while to get hold of a T8 driver that wasn't too chunky to fit into the heatsink. Ended up having to weld a T8 bit onto an extension piece as I couldn't find a proper driver...

Thanks to the excellent instructions it was a painless experience!

Trap for young players (me) make a note of which way up the ribbon cables are inserted (they normally have some colour or paint on them to indicate if its not obvious from the layout). I had to pull the unit out again after I found I'd put the cable for the SD card slot in upsid down...

Now have 40GB free space for music.

One question: has anyone tried resizing the partitions on the drive after its setup? Its annoying to have a ~20GB partition for <1GB of map data.

Also recommend adding JohnC's thread as a sticky.

[johnc]

I have one question though...do you need to format the HDD in any particular prior to install? (NTFS, etc)

The format of the drive is done when you install the firmware on the unit. I wasn't 100% sure what I did when I did this a year ago, but after doing it again recently for mikinoz, you do need to install the firmware and then the maps. I may have noted that you could just do the maps.

Have updated the original post to show this.

[csd1uk]

Perfect Thanks

Just make sure the SSD is PATA not SATA.

[mikinoz]

Just make sure the SSD is PATA not SATA.

[csd1uk]

I hadn't even thought of this...now it is going to be the first thing I do! I have a 64Gb SSD sitting in my office!

Muchos Gracias for the write up.

I have one question though...do you need to format the HDD in any particular prior to install? (NTFS, etc)

Cheers