atomic pop

Yes, I have a Zune. Yes, it’s brown. Yes, I like it.

The one thing that I really found limiting was the capacity. I don’t need 80 GB, but I definitely need more than 30. I’ve been using the Zune Pass subscription a lot; it lets me download and listen to a lot of music I’d probably never have heard or bought, and combined with my ripped CDs, I filled my Zune. I tried deleting older music, but couldn’t find enough that I was ready to part with to make a real difference. Yeah, I haven’t listened to Dark Side of the Moon in a few years, but just considering it as a candidate for removal made me want to hear it again.

So last week I decided to replace the built-in hard drive with a larger-capacity model. I know this voids the warranty on my Zune but I really needed that space. ZuneMods.net has instructions on how to do it, and I found a brand new compatible 60GB drive on eBay for 60 bucks. Yesterday, I did it.

Before (note available space is 0) :

It was scary taking it apart. The only real issue was that it wasn’t clear in the instructions how to open the ZIF (zero insertion force) ribbon cable connector, but with a little help from Chronic on the forums at Zune Mods, I figured it out.

After replacing the drive and hooking the battery back up, the Zune detected a blank drive and asked me to connect it to my PC. It upgraded itself to the latest firmware (1.4) and voila:

A few hours later after re-synching all my content (including songs that didn’t fit before and some update snaps of Lina) and updating my wallpaper:

That’s it. It all went remarkably smoothly. Rock on.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 03:54 and is filed under shane. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.