Recently bought the 1TB 4 channel tuner model of Amazon Recast during the Prime Day sale. The unit itself is a very nice network tuner and I mainly bought the more expensive model for the extra tuner channels (the cheaper model only has a 2 channel tuner as well as less local storage). One downside is there seems to be a bit of high frequency whine from either the fan or 1Tb HDD which, while it not near the main TV, is annoying enough to my ears where its located near my main PC. Some available information online shows that both the drive is a standard Western Digital 5400RPM 1Tb SATA HDD and that drive is using the EXT4 filesystem. I will be replacing it with a 1Tb Western Digital Blue SSD that was on sale at the local BestBuy. I will be using Linux to easily complete the transfer using a basic 2.5" SATA to USB3.0 enclosure and this teardown guide as a reference. The main things of note are that the HDD does not contain the OS for the Recast, likely using onboard flash storage for the OS, and is just using the drive as file storage for the Recast application and that the files must be owned by UID 1000 with owner RW permissions. Since UID 1000 is the default first user account UID the files will likely show as being owned by your user name. Copy/paste all the files from the HDD to the SSD, confirm the file ownership and permission, and then reassemble the device. If you transferred the files correctly then you should be able to load and play any previously recorded content via the FireTV phone app or device. Since the old drive is still usable and the Recast won't spin up external storage until the internal storage is full, I plugged the old drive into a USB3 hub, so the tuner can still be powered, and plugged the hub into the back of the Recast. Pretty simple little mod that's more of an indulgence than a requirement, but it really finishes off making this thing the perfect over the air network DVR.
