RNS-510 HDD replacement/SSD swap DIY

**kamold** · 01-09-2011, 07:11 AM

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.

**aussietig** · 02-09-2011, 01:18 AM

Originally Posted by kamold

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** · 02-09-2011, 05:49 AM

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.

**Transporter** · 02-09-2011, 07:23 AM

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

It is stickie.

**Corey_R** · 02-09-2011, 08:54 AM

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

**Idle** · 02-09-2011, 12:20 PM

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.

**johnc** · 02-09-2011, 12:25 PM

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** · 02-09-2011, 12:38 PM

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** · 02-09-2011, 12:41 PM

Originally Posted by Transporter

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

It is stickie.

Thanks. :thumb up:

Originally Posted by Corey_R

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.