Here's my situation:

I just bought a 5040 this morning. I will go for the lifetime activation. I want to upgrade the HD capacity.

I have a spare Maxtor 5400rpm 80GB HD that I thought about using.

I have read that the Replay Hack Project doesn't recomend installing 2 HDs into the 5000-series ReplayTVs. And that it seems upgrading the HD with the 7200rpm with the 8MB cache is the ticket (and I won't forget to use the CS "cable select" setting on the HD).

Here's what I wanted to know (2-folds):

Should I use my spare 5400rpm 80GB HD, or go with the faster 7200rpm drives (will performance be degraded if I use the 5400rpm HD?) within my upgrade plan below:

And which upgrade path should I take:

Path 1:

Take the "virgin" HD from the 5040 (not even booted up) and use the patch programs on the Replay Hack site to patch the larger HD (whichever one is the consensus suggestion). Will this program "clone" the larger HD of the contents on the original HD, or just prep it for use with the Replay OS?

Then boot up the new larger HD, and get Sonic Blue to do the lifetime subscription activation.

Then store the original HD for a rainy day.

Path 2:

Boot up with the original HD and have Sonic Blue activate the lifetime subscription.

Use the patch program to clone/patch the orignal HD onto the larger HD (does the HD have the lifetime activation infomation on it)?

Install the larger HD into the 5040, and store the original HD (with lifetime subscription activation info on it?) away for a rainy day.

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I'm rather confused as to what tells the machine it has lifetime subscription activation, (is it within firmware, or the 500MB Replay partition) thus my question.

I would choose Path #2. In fact, that is basically what I'm doing with my new 5040. I am going to stick wiith the 40GB until my warranty runs out just to be safe, since putting in a new drive breaks the seal and voids your warranty (though some have said that as long as you put everything back as it originally was, Sonic Blue will still honor it). However, I should note that I can live with 40GB for a while since I already have a 120GB Showstopper (aka ReplayTV 3000). YMMV.

As far as the new HD goes, in the AVS forums, several people have reported better performance with 7200RPM drives (especially when doing multiple things at once like playing and recording or sending/receiving shows). 5400 RPM was the way to go for older ReplayTVs; but since the 5040 has a fan, the added heat of 7200RPM shouldn't be a problem. I would go with 7200RPM and something larger than 80GB if possible (I want to put a bigger drive than is already in my Showstopper).

The info on lifetime subscription activation is not stored on the drive but in a flash memory store (I think). Thus, you can upgrade your drive at any time (before or after activation).

BTW, The upgrade procedure for me with the ShowStopper was easy and painless. The drive that was originally in my ShowStopper is now in my computer. There is not a lot of reason to keep the original for a rainy day unless you decide to upgrade within the warranty period (so you could put it back in) or you have no other use for it. What I would keep is an image of the original drive (i.e. an image created by RTVPatch) burned onto a CDR. That way if you ever do have problems with the new drive you can just re-image another drive and put it in.

Hope that helps.

Thanks! I've bought the 100GB 7200rpm 8MB cache HD on Sunday, and am dying to give it a go, but I'll be taking baby steps to make sure the original drive works first.

I just revamped my HT setup last night, so now I finally can integrate the Replay 5040 into the mix. Woo hoo! I even have ethernet now running into my HT/living room just for the 5040.