Change Drive in Sony RDR-GX330

[glengoode]

I have an RDR-GX330 and the drive has gone out. The connection looks like a standard IDE connection. I grabbed an IDE drive from my computer and attached it to the GX330 and the prompt says "Close" as if the drawer is open. I read somewhere that a Sony DRU-840A could be used in this unit, so I purchased one. Same result. It starts to boot up, gets past "Welcome" then it closes the tray, but the display never changes. It just says "Close". Any idea how I can get this to work? Thanks for any help.

[oldfart13]

Probably needs to be married to the motherboard. Check the Pioneer hard drive section of this site. Will need a service remote. Luckily those only cost $25. Should be good to go. I got one of those recorders for $15 from an estate sale. Guy only used it for playback and not recording, so the burner was in excellent shape. I don't use the unit though as I prefer my later model Pioneers with hard drives.

Good luck...

[orsetto]

Probably needs to be married to the motherboard. Check the Pioneer hard drive section of this site. Will need a service remote.

Unfortunately, this idea does not work with the RDR-GX330: while it is true Sony and Pioneer co-produced nearly-identical DVD/HDD recorders from late 2005 thru late 2008, the 330 was not part of that group. It is instead one of the very last "purely Sony" recorders, with all the good and bad points that implies. One of the bad points is it had a really crummy burner which is no longer repairable or replaceable at any cost, given Sony discontinued the burner while the 330 was actually still being sold (in defiance of consumer product laws). The Pioneer repair threads here on VH can be applied only to certain Sony DVD/HDD models, roughly the x50 series thru the x90. The x10, x15, x25 and x30 Sonys use a completely different operating system and burner/HDD interface.

An "RDR-GX-anything" model with a dead burner is unsalvageable today: no replacement burner is available and generic Sony PC burners won't work because they don't have the proprietary copy-protection chips exclusive to recorder burners. Your only option is to look for a second-hand 330 that still works, but since all of these older Sonys are prone to burner failure I wouldn't advise putting too much money in another used unit unless you have a LOT of unfinalized discs sitting around. Even in that case, there are ways to finalize such discs in a PC or the new Magnavox MDR533, 535 or 537 DVD/HDD recorders available from WalMart website as low as $229. The Magnavox burners are significantly more reliable than the old Sony design, and the units have a "make disc compatible" function which can reportedly finalize discs from several other recorder brands.

[jman98]

Interesting thread. I did not know that about the copy protection chips. Once again Sony's capacity to screw over the consumer approaches infinity, as does the willingness of the consumer to simply bend over and take it up the wazoo as if no other manufacturer made any alternatives to any of Sony's products.

[orsetto]

To be fair, it wasn't only Sony that insisted on proprietary screwball recorder-specific burners with added CP/DRM chips: just about every DVD recorder brand did this (aside from a handful of early lowball mfrs who sold primarily in Europe and used totally generic random PC burners). The bigger problem with Sony was their early recorder-specific burners being total crap, the recorders were priced a good 30% higher than the competition, and Sony discontinued replacement parts so fast it could make your head spin. Early Sonys were prized by some owners for their arguably "much sharper" recordings compared to other brands at the time, but this was hotly contested by others like LordSmurf who thought the "sharpness" was really just fake video peaking. What isn't arguable is the damn things failed repeatedly with "dirty disc" errors, often enough to drive owners mad (esp considering the outrageous premium pricing back in the day).

Sony's overall best models were the later DVD/HDD series ending in 15 or 25, like RDR-HX525, which were massive best-sellers outside USA/Canada. Their successors were the Pioneer/Sony collaboration series with model numbers like 780 and 990 (huge sellers in Europe but unavailable in North America except as the short-lived Canadian RDR-HX780). All of these were near-identical to a Pioneer 640 (or later 550). When Pioneer had its meltdown in 2008, Sony opted to bail and move to Samsung as OEM, which cratered their global recorder reputation so fast it wasn't even funny to Sony-haters.

[glengoode]

Thanks so much for the replies, even though the news was not very good. I appreciate you taking the time to explain the problem.