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A while back, we
reviewed Creative's Nomad Jukebox Zen and gave it our "Extreme Excellence
Award" for its generous storage capacity, excellent sound quality and powerful
feature-rich interface. The Zen has quickly become one of Creative's top
selling products. While its 20gig capacity will satisfy many, some
demanding audiophiles crave more storage space but don't want to settle for a
larger, bulkier MP3 player. If your a hardcore
audiophile like myself, you have an extensive collection of MP3's and CD's and
only find it growing rapidly as you discover more great music. What if
you can upgrade the small yet powerful Nomad Jukebox Zen to 40gigs or even
60gigs? Well you can!
It's actually quite simple. All you need is the proper hard drive and
the guts to open it up! This guide will not only show you how,
but will also provide some information on exactly what hard drive the Zen uses
and what drives can be used to replace it. Let's get started shall we?
What exactly is in the Zen?
**click to enlarge**
The Nomad Jukebox Zen uses a smaller notebook pc
hard drive. It is made by Fujitsu and the specific model number is
MHR2020AT. Its interface is Ultra ATA/100 with a 2MB buffer and a
rotational speed of 4200RPM. The dimensions of this ultra compact drive
are 0.37"x2.8"x3.9". The screenshot above is the original drive we removed from
the player.
What drives can be used to replace it?
You can replace the original drive with a 40gig
or 60gig Fujitsu notebook PC hard drive. Some Toshiba models have also
been tested and are known to work properly. One thing to keep in mind is that
the Zen seems to have a file limit. The amount of files that can
be stored in the Zen depends on how much data is in your MP3 tags.
While some have successfully installed a 60gig hard drive in the Zen, a few
have already reached their file limit. There is some debate
whether is can be corrected with a simple firmware update however, it seems to
be more of an OS limitation. More information on this can be found at
Nomadness.
This is an excellent website on Creative's MP3 players and has a great user
forum in which you will be able to find some discussions on upgrading the Zen.
There are quite a few users there that have successfully upgraded their Zen
but a few have not been able to fill all 60gigs because of this file limit.
This number is quite high (around 10,600) so it should not be an issue for
most. I don't see how someone can have that many mp3's that they
actually listen to. Mostly, they are people who just rip every CD they
have including the bad songs which they probably will never listen to.
40gigs should be plenty for most.
Fujitsu Drives
The third letter of the model number on the
Fujitsu hard drive stands for the product counter. It increments in
order of product introduction. The MHR2020AT (original drive used
in the ZEN) is already a discontinued model so you will have a hard time
finding one of these. The next model up is the MHS series. These
drives are readily available and can be used to replace the original drive.
You can opt of the 40gig or 60gig model. Fujitsu also recently
released their next gen notebook PC hard drives which are the MHT series
drives. These have been release in March and are only available at
select online stores such as Newegg which tends to get new product releases
before anyone else. The specs for all of these Fujitsu drives are
basically the same. Major differences being only in the amount of
storage per platter as well as some other technological advancements such as
improved reliability and shock tolerance.
The following Fujitsu drives will work with the
Zen:
MHR2040AT
MHS2040AT (The one we installed and tested in
this guide)
MHS2060AT
MHT2040AT
MHT2060AT
Toshiba Drives
We recommend that you stick to Fujitsu drives
but the following Toshiba drives are known to work with the Zen:
MK6021GAS
Now that we know what drives can be used, let's
open this baby up shall we?
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