re: My OG Xbone bricked, about to replace hard drive myself. Any advice?

Hard drove came in early. Downloaded the OSU1 update to a flash drive, installed hard drive in the xbone straight out of the box, did an offline update. Up and running in about 20 minutes.

So, with the latest update you don't need to do any pre-work with the new hard drive. As long as it's blank brand new out of the box, same size as your old one (1TB in my case) it'll partition itself and happily fire up like a brand new Xbox.

If you go up in size you might need to partition it yourself first. Not sure about that part.

Load times SEEM to be much faster, but I haven't played it in about 6 months so I'm not sure if it really is any faster or not.

Eta: forgot to mention that you won't get the green boot-up animation going this route. It takes a good bit of extra legwork to get that. Alternatively, you can just wait until another update comes out and it will install itself then. I saw no need for it and skipped that.