naim_hdx_hard_disk_player pdf:
*Joining the two vastly different worlds of audio and *
*computing wasn’t easy. The development process of *
*Naim’s servers and Hard Disk player has been long and *
*arduous. The amount learnt in the process has been *
*huge. The result, we believe, is products we can be *
*proud of. Products that are Naim through and through *
*and products that we think we set a new standard in the *
*market. *
*It’s not customary in a white paper to thank the team but *
*everyone worked so hard and had so much good input *
*that I just have to. Thanks, you all know who you are. *
*Gary Crocker * Naim Audio
Read the white paper… that’s not just a PC or raspberry Pi with audio distrib. He would have deserved to be saved (but not at that price) RIP HDX ! You are now Queen of my garbage dump. Thanks Naim self-reSTRICTing policy !
Yes of course there is a lot of gumph from naim and the device was stuffed full of gubbins, but at its heart is a bog standard micro ATX board, thats the bit that is obsolete and therefore you have to let her go into that fair night.
I had an NS02 for a number of years. They did alright as a server provided you were in no rush. There are many many far better options out there. For your next endevour, I would propose get a decent streamer, but leave the serving duties to a proper PC.
The cost seems very reasonable. You don’t pay for the complexity of the repair, you pay for the time of the skilled Naim service engineer. So a new disk plus a couple hours for an experienced engineer (you don’t get a basic engineer for a basic repair) plus a decent markup to make the service department viable and that cost seems about right.
FWIW, the last time I worked with Microsoft OEM licenses, they were only valid for distribution on a new hard drive shipped from the OEM vendor. Anything else would land a vendor in court.
For an OEM distribution, most hardware vendors provide either a backup solution or reinstallation disks. And to answer the question of excessive costs, do we really need a highly skilled technician for a disk image dump?
Seems pretty dear to me…
I’d be annoyed and rather let down.
This sort of thing is very frustrating and I remember being pretty unamused when a hasselblad lens stopped working with flash 20 years ago. £250 to replace a £10 part within the lens. The lens itself cost £1600 and fortunately I could write it off on the business.
Might be better to ditch it out of principle and get an innuos.New with warranty for 2 years and easy to backup to an external plug in usb drive.
Personnal point of view, I think if you need such engineer and not a good standard technician for that kind of repair, then there were serious flaws in the engineering design to begin with.
Which I doubt is the case.
It seems to me the price is base on old days when these technologies were less common knowledge maybe. But since I don’t really know all that is being done for such repair, I’ll restrain myself from judging.
I sympathise, and while I can see arguments from both sides, it seems crazy that you have to scrap a functional device that’s served you well due to a hardware component failure which is easily replacable.
It seems odd to me that Naim could simply not supply a pre-imaged replacement drive for installation with the OEM software pre-activated based on your HDX’s serial number and tied to that.
Perhaps some legacy design/licensing issues are at play but the price seems to attract a hefty premium for what you actually get considering suitable parts are still available - in some instances they aren’t but in this case from your information they are.
Naim have always been regarded as a brand which supports products far older than their current product line but this seems over the top cost wise to me.
Na mate, its a rogering right an proper. 50 quid harddrive. The case takes about 2 minutes to remove, the drive a further five. I am sure naims engineers are great but I am willing to bet they arn’t paying them 250 quid an hour.
When someone charges 1000 to replace an hard drive is strangely ripping someone, any brand that charges 1000 euros for 1 or 2 terabyte an hard drive replacement is not honest.
Mechanic hard drives fail after some time, so the brand must know will have to deal with it sooner or later, for less than 1000 euros you can buy a 18 terabyte drive, a 1 terabyte is 50 euros, so charging 950 euros extra makes no sense to me.
Greed of a dealer or a brand on the user bad luck is not acceptable, but it has becoming every year more and more a common practice unfortunately.
A satisfied customer is a loyal one and will grow with the brand for life, a unsatisfied one will go another way. Support is as or more important than the brand we choose to love, because when we have to deal with it, it will define the future of the sales to that customer flor the dealer or brand.
From reading this thread @Richard.Dane has clarified the Naim service position.
On a technical front there, these products are in practice a Windows XPE solution, but running a lot of custom software and has custom PCB’s with more processors on that make the overall product work.
On these products the Hard drive SMART data is used to drive the thermal management of the product. It needs the right drive in it (there are about 4 or so supported drives) and these drives are not easy to get hold of as its tech from 10+ years ago.
The init sequence to get these servers operational is not as easy as just put a new hard drive in. The Digifi software stack that makes it an audio server needs specialist knowledge & process to get it configured properly when starting from a clean drive (the drive needs correctly binding to the main motherboard board in the Digifi SQL database). There is one chance to do the sequence right and if messed up, the drive needs re-cloning again.
Hence why it really needs to go into the authorised service centre, who not only do the above but also check over everything else. On these old servers the capacitors on the VIA motherboard are starting to dry out which can be the next area of failure. With some of the server repairs, Naim end up replacing a lot of parts to get the servers back to a good working standard again. This is not latest spec PC parts (hence $100 for a hard drive etc), but rather computing tech from 15years ago that we need to source and its not cheap.
To summarise, Naim are there to support these aging products as best we can, but it ultimately comes at a cost.
OP:
See if you can get it updated to SSD. I don’t know if NAIM HQ are still doing this but some distributors are. Then most of the wearand tear is on the NAS holding the music.
Yes, the “discontinued” this a while back due to the lack of availability of SLC SSDs. However, I understand that some distributors may be updating with MLC SSDs now.
There is a conversation elsewhere today where a user is complaining that the 1tb hard drive in his innuos zenmini has failed and innuos have quoted him £54 to replace it. I didn’t bother to comment. To be fair he also had a problem with the main board so his total cost was a bit higher I guess.
I did but it doesn’t change the fact that if a hard drive fails, and they do, the cost to replace it is prohibitive because of the way the device is designed. If anything it makes it worse, I wouldnt buy a server if I knew that a part as simple as a hard drive played such a big part in the management of that device because obviously replacing a cheap hard drive would result in obscene repair costs
Ok, if you saw it then I don’t know why you keep writing about the cost of a current hard drive, when the repair cost for the HD is obviously not driven by that, as clearly stated by Steve.
When the Zenmini is so old that Innous can’t simply buy a hard drive for it anymore, but has to source outdated models through special channels, they won’t be quoting £54 for it, either, if they even repair it at all by then.
Apart from that, clearly Naim made some questionable decisions with the HDX depending on Windows XP Embedded and whatnot. This is not news, but it happened more than 15 years ago and nothing can be done about it now.
