Creative Labs 30GB Nomad Jukebox

Upgrading the Jukebox

As we mentioned before, the Jukebox comes standard with a 6GB laptop hard drive, but as you may have gathered from our disassembly of the unit, getting a replacement hard drive in there is not a big deal. So how does one go about increasing your storage capacity from the standard 6GB?

Well, it is not as easy as some would like. First off, the Nomad Jukebox uses a proprietary file format on the hard drives, meaning that if you pop in an unformatted hard drive or even a standard formatted hard drive, your player will not work. The only way to get the file format off the Jukebox and on a replacement hard drive is to hook the replacement hard drive and your original Jukebox hard drive to a computer (using a 2.5" to 3.5" hard drive adapter) and use a program that can copy each bit of information from one drive (the original) to another (the replacement).

If this isn't reason enough for you to stay away from upgrading the Jukebox yourself, we have heard that some drives to not work on the Jukebox. For example, we have heard that the IBM TravelStar drives do not enjoy being placed in a Jukebox system.

So how does one increase storage capacity of their Jukebox? The best way we have seen is to go to NomadJukebox.NET. Here you have a variety of upgrade options.

First off, if you are already a owner of a Nomad Jukebox, you can choose to buy an upgrade hard drive from the site. You can choose to have the company send you a replacement drive directly to your house, preformatted with the proper format for a self install or you can order the upgrade and ship your unit to the company for them to install for you. Either way the 30GB upgrade will cost you $249.99 which is actually a great price considering that buying one of the Toshiba HDD2159 30GB 9.5mm laptop hard drives that the upgrade uses off will cost you $245.00. The extra $5 is sure to be worth it in all cases, since you do not have to worry about getting the Creative file system onto your replacement drive.

Click here to enlarge.

Secondly, if you are in the market for a Nomad Jukebox and have a feeling that you want more than the 6GB that the unit ships with, you can order a new 30GB Nomad Jukebox, like the one we looked at here today, from NomadJukebox.NET for $499.99 (for the Nomad Jukebox C). This is, not surprisingly, $250 more than the standard Nomad Jukebox C sells for, thus covering the cost of the upgrade.

The quality of the unit we were sent was great, as we experienced no problem with either the unit or the upgraded hard drive. Although upgrading the hard drive does void the Creative Labs warranty on the card, NomadJukebox.NET includes the same 90 day warranty on the product that Creative does. In addition, the Toshiba hard drive used in our upgrade included its own warranty directly from Toshiba.