Upgrading The Hard Drive In My Original XBox

I have just finished the final part of refurbishing my original ‘crystal’ Xbox tonight. I had previously replaced the GPU and CPU paste, cleaned the entire case, replaced the PSU board, system fan, DVD drive and bottom EMF shield. I even replaced the DVD drive belt. I took it one step further and softmodded it using Rocky5 and the Splinter Cell exploit. This gaming beast had the full make-over treatment. 

But there was one final step I wanted to do and that was upgrade the hard drive. The original 8GB drive was showing its age and wasn’t really big enough to take advantage of the extra things you can do on a modded Xbox.

So I grabbed a 160GB IDE Seagate hard drive and set about installing it. I could have put up to a 2.2TB drive in it, but my budget was tight. Also putting in a SATA drive requires buying a converter and new IDE cable.

There is a single IDE channel on the Xbox motherboard which the DVD drive and hard drive run off, so only two devices can be hooked up at once, but an Xbox wont boot if the DVD isn’t there – so you can’t simply put the second hard drive in the place of the DVD drive.

Full instructions are available online, but the basics are, buy a Molex splitter so you can power two hard drives at once, install Chimp a special cloning tool, then quickly remove the IDE cable from the DVD drive while the Xbox is still on and plug it in the new hard drive. This is the ‘hot swap’ method. Now you can run Chimp and clone the old drive to the new drive. Then if everything has gone well, you can shut down everything and put your Xbox back together with your new hard drive in place of the old one.

The whole process took about 45 minutes and I am now sitting here with my Xbox running even better than before with a 160GB hard drive instead of the 8GB stock drive.

Replacing the noisy fan and DVD drive made it a lot quieter, but now with the new hard drive, it is super quiet. The new hard drive is a 7200 rpm drive (vs the 5400 rpm stock drive) so it is not only quieter but should be faster. This will be especially handy when copying games to the hard drive and playing them off of it.

160GB might not be the biggest drive, but when each game is less that 5GB, it will hold a large amount of my games. I would need at least 500GB to house all my games and the collection keeps growing. I want it just for my favourite go-to games or the ones I am playing through now. It saves wear-and-tear on the DVD drive and makes loading a lot quicker.

So there you have it. My beloved Xbox has been given a much deserved pampering. I am very happy with it. Not only does my crystal look gorgeous, but it performs super smooth and super quiet too.

I'm now going to start copying a few games across to the hard drive.

Written by Simon Royal. Follow me at twitter.com/simonroyal

Revitalising a Dell Latitude E5410 with an SSD

I have had my Latitude E5410 for a few months and I love it. It's a real workhorse and despite its age it performs amazingly. It's an i5 2.4Ghz machine with 8GB DDR3 and Intel HD Graphics.

However, the ageing hard drive is its only downside. Boot times were very slow and apps could be a bit sluggish to open. I think I noticed this more as my previous computer was a MacBook Air with an SSD.

So I bit the bullet after weeks of deliberation and ordered an SSD. The original 5400rpm Western Digital Blue 320GB SATA hard drive was to be replaced with a Kingston A400 240GB SATA SSD.

The thing I love about this Latitude is its ease of upgradability. Simply pop the bottom off and you have access to the RAM and hard drive. A few screws hold in the drive caddy and a further two screws attach the drive to the caddy. Swapping them over was easy and within 5 minutes the SSD was installed.

Next step was to reinstall Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon 64-bit. I have my trusty USB stick, so installing was easy. I can't say if this was any quicker because I was downloading multimedia codecs at the same time.

However, once installed there was an instantly noticeable speed increase across the whole machine. The next task was to put back all my apps – via Synaptic Package Manager – and it stormed through them. System updates were next and then a few apps that needed to be found online (such as Chrome, Reaper and Geekbench).

Before removing the older hard drive, I did some timed tests to see if this SSD upgrade would make the huge improvement that everyone had said would happen. I then redid those tests with the SSD installed.

As you can see from the table below the upgrade did the trick. Boot time went from a rather slow 150 seconds down to 37 seconds, and apps opening time have halved.

The whole machine feels so much snappier. An added bonus is the laptop is whisper quiet, with the SSD it makes no noise except the occasional whirr of the system fan.

I am extremely happy. It has breathed new life in to my beloved Latitude E5410. Its a chunky machine that I was very happy with and now I am super impressed with the upgrade.

I now have a spare 320GB hard drive that I am not sure what to do with. I could replace the internal DVD-RW in this Dell with it via a converter caddy giving me two internal drives, but I do like having an optical drive even if it only used occasionally.

Written by Simon Royal. Follow me at twitter.com/simonroyal

Further reading:

17/11/2020 - Revitalising a Dell Latitude E6500 with an SSD

Upgradeable Laptops... A Thing Of The Past?

Upgradeability seems to be a thing of the past when it comes to modern computers. The obsession with ultra thin ‘everything on the board’ is a problem for technology and the end user. Perhaps that's why I prefer older machines.

Switching from a MacBook Air with zero upgrade options, to a Dell Latitude E5410 laptop recently I was surprised by the upgrade options and the ease of accessibility to do it on this 10 year old laptop.

OK, so the MacBook Air might have been stylish, light and super thin, but that comes at a cost. This Dell Latitude might be chunky, boxy and won't win any beauty awards, but it has bags of upgradeability.

Turn the laptop over and there is an access panel, which is opened via one screw. Open that and you have access to the hard drive, the RAM, the wi-fi PCIe card, the CPU cooling pipe, the CMOS battery and even the system fan. All of which are super easy to take out, clean or replace.

Even on the top of the machine, more complicated repairs are still easier to do than on most hardware. Above the keyboard is a plastic strip where the power button is, it has a small hole which you can easily get a screwdriver or spudger under and pop it off, this gives you access to the screen hinges. While I had it off, I tightened them up, which solved the slight wobble I was seeing.

But the biggest surprise was the keyboard. According to the maintenance manual, undo two screws to release the keyboard and simply pull the tap (which is now visible) above the keyboard and you can just pull it out. I was expecting some kind of ribbon cable attaching it to the motherboard – from my experience these can be tricky to detach and reattach. However, this was different, the keyboard connector is a thick plastic tab that is hidden under the top casing and you just pull out the keyboard. I took mine out and gave it a good clean. Putting the keyboard back was super easy, simple slide it back down, put in the screws and keyboard is replaced.

This is an excellent idea. Imagine spilling something on your keyboard. You can remove that from your machine within seconds, wash it, dry it and put it back. Or worse case, you could just buy another one and put it in.

Add this to the fact the battery is replaceable in seconds by simply pushing a tab and pulling it out, this makes this a fantastic machine for those who like to do things to their computers.

Not only that I like to open up kit and give it a good clean, blow out all that dust and dirt and you can really get in to this machine.

The official service manual has a great strip down guide for most parts – some such as the screen is a bit more complex, but that is to be expected. But everything is far more accessible than anything I have used before and the fact that Dell give you instructions and almost permission to do it is an amazing thing.

I think the only thing that isn't replaceable on this laptop is the CPU.

Companies these days don't want you to be able to upgrade. They want you to replace it with a newer model or send it in to them for an overpriced repair.

But for me, I like the idea of upgradeability and repairability. It's my property, I want to be able to do what I want to it. I want to keep it going for as long as possible.

So hats of to Dell – who I have to admit I haven’t had a good word to say about before I got this laptop – for creating such an easily repairable machine.

Written by Simon Royal. Follow me at twitter.com/simonroyal