Panasonic DMR EH50 - HDD Upgrade

[agdex]

Please provide directions on how to upgrade the HDD to a larger one.
Thanks
Louis

[orsetto]

Cannot be done. The Panasonic DVD/HDD models are hardwired on the motherboard to only recognize the drive capacity they originally came with. So if you did manage to install a 500GB drive, the EH50 would insist on formatting it to 100GB. Most owners have had a real hard time replacing the HDD in their older EH50. Typically the units will insist on receiving the exact same brand and model of HDD that they came with or they will refuse to work. A few people have managed to load alternative drives, using a variety of methods, but as noted the machine will never recognize more capacity than it came with. If your EH50 is otherwise working OK, leave well enough alone.

If you feel very constrained by its HDD size, you might consider saving up some money to buy a new "grey market import" model Panasonic EH59 or Panasonic EH69. These are available for $369 and $419, respectively, from pro photo/video dealer B&H in NYC. Occasionally B&H has mint in box "demo" models of the EH59 on sale for as little as $259, as today. The EH59 has 250GB HDD and the EH69 has 320GB HDD, they are otherwise identical (except the EH69 also has a SD memory card slot for viewing your digital camera photos on TV). Both models lack any sort of tuner for North American broadcasts or cable and neither has the TVGOS feature: you would need to have a cable or satellite decoder box to connect via line inputs for tuning channels, or one of the little accessory ATSC off-air conversion boxes the US gov't subsidized a couple years ago (such as Zenith DTT-901). The EH59 and EH69 can be set to operate in either NTSC or PAL format, for multiregion recording. In USA and Canada you would set them to NTSC. In every other way the EH59 and EH69 operate just like an EH50, with some additional convenience features.