greyeagle55

Hello everyone, I'm new to the boards and after looking around and searching for a bit I've not found an answer to my questions. I'm trying to help some friends who without much research went and bought this Defender SN 501 system for their store. It's a 16 channel and they run 16 cameras, it has a very small 500GB HDD. I have read their manual backwards and forwards, I've been online to the company website and had a chat with them, I've called them and spoken to different people, I've read the online manual for this system, which is different by the way than the one my friends have, all to no avail. I want to setup an external HDD for my friends on this system in other words a hard drive in an enclosure that is hooked up by the USB port on the front. I'm being told that all I can do is use a 32GB flash drive or hook up a portable CD/DVD burner to get the files that are on this system. I keep asking Why? What is the difference between using a flash drive and a external HDD? I keep not getting any answer but " you can't use anything but a flash drive or burner". Would one of the experts here have any idea why this is? Is there a way around it? If there isn't would buying another DVR to hook up their cameras to solve the problem? What type of DVR would they need for something like what they want to do? I know nothing and less than nothing about a security system, I build and repair home computers so I have a little knowledge in that direction but nothing like this. I would surely appreciate any ideas, thoughts, information or suggestions on this. Thanks very much.

You all are just wonderful, Thank you so much for your information and your help! I'm a computer person and just have no knowledge at all about these things but I surely feel I'm learning something here! " title="Applause" /> I'm going to pass on your suggestions and information and ideas to my friends. Just makes me so angry that they were basically lied to in so many pretty words about what this system really could and couldn't do. Thank you again to all of you! I will be recommending this forum to anyone who needs help with things like this.

thank you very much Tom I appreciate your help. Yes, that's basically what it boils down too. They wanted to use a 2 TB external drive that when the little 500GB was full it would just start to store footage or clips as defender calls them on the other drive or at the least be able to hook up the external drive and take the clips off of the internal drive and put them on that drive to store them for later use and viewing in other words to backup the files. I understand now that they can't do that I still don't understand why, what the difference would be using a flash drive to get the files or using an external drive to get the files but I guess that is just something that I'll never know. I did ask defender about switching out the internal drive, 500GB to a 1.5 TB which they say it will take but I was told if I did that it would void their warranty. So they are just stuck with either doing daily disk burns or buying a whole lot of flash drives. I think that if they could find a DVR that would accommodate their 16 cameras they would be better off. Do you think that would work? Is there such a DVR that would do that? Are camera cables kind of universal or do they require special ports and plugs and special DVR's? thanks again very much for your help.

This seems to be a very knowledgeable group of people here and I look forward to learning from all of you. I primarily build and repair computers but friends having more confidence in me than I do have insisted that I try to help them with their Defender Security System, which I can't make heads or tails of. I hope to begin my learning here with the help of the pros' on this site. My best to everyone, greyeagle