Voiding the warranty is, unfortunately, a necessary evil if you want to upgrade the DMP-HD610 with a bigger hard drive. Although D-Link doesn't recommend or suggest doing this, they do claim that the DMP-HD610 is, in fact, upgradeable.

We attempted to upgrade our DMP-HD610 from the included 10GB hard drive to use a 20GB 2.5" hard drive. Theoretically, you should be able to upgrade the unit to use any 9.5mm 2.5" laptop-style hard drive. Although we did test the DMP-HD610 with hard drives in both 4200 RPM and 5400 RPM speeds, we saw no difference in performance between the two. We did, however, notice with the 5400 RPM hard drive installation that the back of the unit was slightly hotter than with the 4200 model.

The key to making this upgrade a smooth process is as simple as using a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter and letting your PC do most of the work. With a little detective work, you should be able to find these 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapters for a reasonable price. If the master/ slave jumper positions are not listed on the drive, you might have to go to the manufacturer's web site in order to find the proper, required jumper positions.

Laptop 2.5" to standard 3.5" IDE hard drive adapters can be handy devices that many techies forget to add to their toolbox. In addition to using IDE hard drive adapters as we did in this article, they can also be useful in recovering data from a damaged or crashed laptop hard drive by using your desktop computer.