Replacing Brennan hard drive with a solid state drive

[Richard Burford]

I just ran a full backup of my B2 to a USB stick, and when I checked at the end there were a lot less (6,500 less) songs in the backup.

I restarted the backup, and it hung up on one song, and then failed. The Brennan issued a message about the HDD being in read only mode.

Another thread that I had seen, but can't find now, mentioned this and said I should delete the failed song, and artist, and retry the backup.

I did that, and the backup is rerunning.

I mentioned in an earlier thread that using an HDD made me a little nervous, as I have had several fail over the years.

I wonder, therefore, how hard would it be to replace the Brennan's 2Tb hard drive with a 1TB SDD - I went with 2TB because I completely overestimated the size of my music library. 31,000 songs is about 256Gb, so 1TB would be plenty. 

There are quite a number of 1Tb SDDs on the market, which are not outrageously expensive.

On the other hand, the Brennan is less than 2 months old, so if it's a hardware failure I expect that it would be covered under a warranty (or I can return it to Amazon).

So, my question for Paul and Martin, is replacing the HDD with a SDD even possible in the Brennan ? How hard would it be ?

All of this is moot if the backup still "misses" 6,500 songs, as the investment in my time to get them loaded was significant. At that point I may also have to consider alternatives. However, I do like the unit, I just don't trust the hard drive. I could reformat it, but have no faith that this would fix the issue. . .

I have attached a screen shot of the statistics after the backup failed. It's also worth pointing out that the backup ran for over 12 hours !

I'd be interested in the thoughts of the Brennan community.

Cheers.

Richard

[Adam Sharpe]

I think that I read somewhere that Martin is aware of this discrepancy in figures and is looking into it?

None of my backups have matched the figure for the B2 copy when viewed on the web UI.

[Brennan Support]

Hello Richard

Martin here - if you are unable to get your music off the B2 then we can fix that under warranty - we use PC disk recovery tools in extremis and have a good record at recovering music - even from reformatted disks.

Please email thebre...@gmail.com to arrange.

(If you have a backup then I'd reformat and reload).

As for replacing the disk with an SSD. Its not hard - I could probably swap one in five minutes - you will take longer because its unfamiliar - but not difficult.

Consider opening your B2 and take a look for yourself. Make sure the SSD that you buy has a a SATA connector like the disk you find in the B2. I have only done it once - and it was straightforward. But  I have seen some fat 4TB hard disk drives that don't mate with the SATA board (they wouldn't fit in the box either).

Martin

[Richard Burford]

Hi Martin, I sent a message to the support email on your website a few days ago, but have not heard anything. Here are my questions that came up as a result of your reply.

I think my approach will be to but a 1Tb SSD from Amazon, and replace the drive in the Brennan. 

I imagine that I will need to format the drive so that the Brennan knows what is going on ?

I would then restore the copy that I made last night, and hopefully the new SDD will have the files that I backed up.

At that point I would have a Brennan with a 1 Tb SSD, and all of the songs that I was able to backup/restore.

Does that make sense ?

So, my questions are:

Can I send you the old 2Tb drive to recover the music from ? I’d also include a USB stick to hold the data, you could return that and do what you will with the HDD.

Which screws on the Brennan do I need to undo to gain access to the HDD, there are quite a few of them !

Will I invalidate the warranty on my Brennan if I do this ?

If it’s easier I can send you the Brennan and the new SDD and you can do the replacement/recovery/restore.

Finally, the SDD drive I am looking at is a

 

Samsung 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E1T0B/AM)

which is reasonably priced and gets really good reviews on Amazon, is that likely to be compatible ?

Thanks for your support.

Richard

[Brennan Support]

Hi Richard

I just checked your email got put into Paul's folder and he has been moving house...

I'm on the road today myself so just a partial answer.

The four screws at the front underneath will release the front panel.

The two screws at the back marked with chevrons.

Leave all the rest

Warranty no problem. Yes we could recover the music from the extracted 2TB.

Martin

[PMB]

Hi Richard,

Apologies for the delay, I have replied to your email address this morning.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Richard Burford]

Thank you both !

[Richard Burford]

Well, that was actually relatively painless. First off, I am by no stretch of the imagination, a hardware person. I design software for a living, hardware is not my thing so I felt quite adventurous taking a screwdriver to the Brennan. That also explains the fact that I have no idea what some of the bits and pieces that I messed around with are called. . .

I purchased a 1Tb SSD, made by Crucial. It had very good reviews on Amazon and was reasonably priced.

I backed up the existing music to a 512Gb USB stick, and checked that the backup seemed reasonable.

I then started following Martin and Paul's instructions. The step were fairly straightforward, but there were a couple of "surprises".

There are, as Martin mentioned, four screws toward the front of the B2, which I unscrewed, and two at the back marked with a chevron. I unscrewed those.

The front panel slid out, and I disconnected the connection between the front panel and the main "card". The back slid out quite happily at that point. What wasn't clear was that the CD drive connection had, during that operation, disconnected. At this point the body of the Brennan contains the CD drive, and you'll have the front panel, back plate and main "card" as separate entities.

The hard drive is on the top of the main "card" (PCB ?), and is held in place by 4 screws which pass through 4 white spacer tubes. Unscrewing those 4 screws releases the hard drive. You are then left with the drive attached to a connector "cable". This is the one part that made me nervous, as that connection seemed to be "glued" with a small dab of silicon rubber. It took some confidence, various thoughts of "I am about to destroy this device", and some gentle pressure to release the hard drive. I cleaned as much of the silicon rubber out as I could.

The new SSD snapped onto the SATA connector, I replaced the 4 screws that hold the drive in place and slid the main card back into the body of the Brennan. 

At that point I realized that I hadn't noticed the CD connection, and although it was fiddly the connection slid into place fairly easily.

The connection for the front panel slid into position and the Brennan was basically back together. I replaced all the screws, powered it on and hey presto, Brennan B2 0GB - aaaaagh.

I disassembled everything and made sure that every connection that I had touched was solid. This time I powered it on and got the 1000Gb that I expected.

I formatted the new drive, using the maintenance menu (I think), and started the restore from my earlier back up.

Replacing the HDD with an SDD took less than 20 minutes, even with the hiccup that I experienced. The restore took about 9 hours, I have tested the CD and network connectivity and all looks good so far. Despite my lack of competence with hardware this was perfectly do-able, and thanks are due to Martin and Paul for the pointers.

[David Gardner]

Richard,

Thanks for that very clear and detailed explanation. It is good to know that such replacements are relatively simple.

[Chris Davidson]

Thanks for all these comments and experiences. Having just successfully installed my SSD (Samsung EVO - 1 terabyte) I have a couple of additional comments:

1) Richard mentioned the ribbon cable attaching the CD drive at the rear of the Brennan. When re-assembling I found it easier to connect the CD drive end of the cable first, then, after sliding the board most of the way in, attaching the other end. It was just too fiddly to do it the other way around!

2) When it came to restoring, after formatting the disk (Settings- Mainenance - Format HDD) the process of restoring appeared to be going well, but ground to a halt after about 400 tracks. What I worked out was that on first fitting the SSD, and therefore before formatting, the Brennan was unable to detect a functioning hard disk and so switched to SD as the storage - hence running out of space for the restore fairly swiftly, and coming to a halt. So it is important to switch back to HDD - (Use HDD) Once I did that, all went smoothly. I hope that is helpful. As Richard says, it actually isn't as daunting a task when you take the plunge!