Cowon Q5W Teardown & Hard Drive Upgrade

There’s already a good, in-depth review on gadgetaholic.com of Cowon’s new, wi-fi enabled, super-PMP (personal/portable media player), the Cowon Q5W, but I’m going to attempt to answer a burning question of current and would-be Q5W owners: “How can I get more storage than 60gb?”

The simple answer is, “Stick a bigger hard drive in it!”. Can it be done? The only answer I can give at this moment is, “I don’t know…yet. But I intend to find out!” First thing I need to do is figure out what’s going on inside of the Cowon. I’m looking to see what kind of hard drive it has, the hard drive connector type, general layout of the internals, available space, etc. That means I have to pull it apart.

Update: This upgrade is possible! Read on…

Beware!If you choose to follow along with the following steps, you WILL void your warranty. I’m accepting the risk for my own Q5W in the name of science and bragging rights, but you might want to think twice about messing with yours and wait to see if I blow mine up first!

Tools you’ll need:

1. A Torx head screwdriver, size T5 (I have no idea what T5 means, except that it’s pretty small). If you’re not familiar a Torx fastener, it’s sort of like an allen head fastener, except instead of a hexagon shape, its more of a star-like shape. I bought a T5 Torx head screwdriver at Radio Shack this afternoon.

That’s it.

Next,we’re going to remove the back cover of the Q5W. This is very easy.

1. There are six torx screws; three on top, and three on the bottom (see photos – the photo on the right shows the screws removed).

2. Gently wiggle the cover off. Be careful here because the battery is mounted to the back cover that you’re tugging on and there is a VERY short battery connector cable to the main circuit board. The connector cable is at the bottom of the unit, so as you’re wiggling off the back, once it’s free of the unit, swing it open as though it’s hinged at the bottom. This will ensure you don’t pull on the connector.

3. Once inside, the hard drive is immediately visible. Pull out the black rubber shock absorber around the drive. As previously noted, check out the short battery connector (left image below).

4. There are some springy mesh shock absorbers stuck on the drive. Gently pull them off and peel back the hard drive cover. It too is stuck on the drive. Pull it back from the direction where the ribbon cable connects to the drive. Once part of the ribbon is exposed, hold it with your thumb while you continue to pull the cover off so you don’t put undue stress on the ribbon.

5. Sit back and admire your accomplishment! Now put it back together exactly as you found it!!!

observations so far is that the Q5W’s hard drive is a 1.8″ Samsung model number HS060HB. It has a ZIF ATA-100 connector, similiar to the 1st generation Zune 30gb (not sure about Zune 2), Creative Zen Vision W, and 5th generation video Ipods. It is a thin drive, thinner than the stock 60gb drive in the Zen, which I have, but there is no problem fitting athicker drive into the Q5W, there is ample room.

What’s next: I am going to attempt to stick ahigher capacityhard drive in the unit (a 100gb 1.8″ Toshiba MK1011GAH). The Q5W is a Windows CE device at its core, so it won’t be a simple matter of swapping out the old drive and putting in a new one. It’s a bit more complicated, so stay tuned!

Dec 18, 2007 Update:

New drive has been shipped. Should be here by Friday, Dec 22nd, so I will be working on the upgrade, hopefully with an update by the next day.

Dec 24, 2007 Update: New drive has arrived! Once again the Q5W was on put onto the operating table for the hard drive transplant. Here are the steps I performed to do the upgrade.

1. Copy ALL of content on your Cowon (not just your media files) to a folder on your PC. All folders, files, subfolders including the Windows system files. Make sure you keep all existing file and folder structures when you copy. I put them in a folder on my C: drive on my desktop computer.
   
2. Follow the steps above, disassemble your Q5W and remove the hard drive. The ZIF ATA-100 connector can be tricky. On the 60gb drive, there is a black connector lock that needs to be flipped up. Use your fingernail to get under it, and flip it towards the ribbon. I’m sorry I can’t give a better description of this process. The photo below shows the black connector (the thin, black strip) in the up postion.
   
3. Install the new drive. You will need to flip the connector lock up on the new drive in order to insert the ribbon connector.
4. Once the new drive is in place, stick the large, sticky cover back on the ribbon cable. In my situation with the new Toshiba drive, I did not need to install the springy spacers because the Toshiba drive is thicker than the stock 60gb drive (see photo below – the stock 60gb drive is on the left, the Toshiba drive on the right).
   
5. Boot your Cowon in Recovery Mode. Do this by first pressing the ‘+’ volume button, then sliding the power switch to the on position and holding. The device should boot up and the screen will go into recovery mode.
   
6. Once in Recovery Mode, connect your Q5W to your computer. Here’s where it gets a little weird. The new drive needs to be formatted, and formatted with the FAT32 file system. Yup, you heard right. The stock 60gb drive is FAT32. My new 100gb drive came formatted with the NTFS file system, and although the Q5Wcould read the drive contents, it would not boot. There is an option to format the drive in the Q5’s Recovery Mode menu, but it won’t work. The Q5W will generate an error message “Dismount Partition Failed”.
   
   I’m running Windows XP, so there is no option for formatting a drive with the FAT32 file system. I downloaded a free utility called “fat32format.exe” from here (direct link to the utility here). Copy this utility to your PC.
7. Take note of your Q5’s drive letter in Windows Explorer. On my PC, it was listed as the G drive.
8. Open a Command Prompt window on your PC (Start -> Run, type “cmd”, and press enter). Change the directory to the root of C (or wherever you placed the fat32format.exe file).
9. Type “fat32format.exe g” (replace g with whatever your Q5’s drive letter is on your PC). The program will ask if your sure you want to format, respond with ‘y’. The format only takes a few seconds.
10. Once the format is complete, copy all of the content you copied back in step 1 in this list back onto the Q5.
11. Shut down your Q5 and restart normally. That’s it!

If all goes well for you, go into your Q5’s system stats and marvel at the additional 40gb of storage.

Some of you are probably already thinking bigger, like the new crop of 160gb drives from the iPod classic. Beware! I examined one of these drives and it does not have the same type of connector as the Cowon’s stock drive. The iPod classic uses a CE-ATA connector which is smaller than the Cowon’s ATA-100 connector.

Firmware upgrades: Yup, they work too:

Hope you enjoyed this article. I found the upgrade easy to do once I figured a few things out. I didn’t immediately discover that the file system on the Cowon’s stock drive was FAT32, but using the Disk Manager in Windows XP allowed me to determine the file system. You can format disks with Disk Manager, but the only formatting option is NTFS.

If you would like me to perform this upgrade for you, I’ll charge you a modest fee of $50 (plus postage) to do the work. But you should really try it yourself! It really is easy. If you still feel unsure of yourself, and want me to do the upgrade, you’ll need to send me your Q5 and the Toshiba drive. Important: Performing this work WILL void your Q5’swarranty. I cannot beheld responsible for any repercussions related to a voided warranty. Do this at your own risk!!!

If you’re still interested, leave me a post at the bottom of this page (I won’t publish it for public viewing) with an email address forcontacting you, and I’ll send you a shipping address.

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