Scruit

http://www.tmz.com/2010/01/07/arenas-gun-standoff-locker-room-video/ (my emphasis)

Do you have a screen that you can have displaying the DVR output while you are driving? I used to have a lilliput 7" lcd screen attached to my windshield using a RAM suction mount. When I am driving I can glance at the screen and make sure that all is well with the DVR. If something causes the HD to become disconnected then all the text from the DVR will turn red. I had a large block of time go missing from my DVR that was because the contents of my trunk hit the dvr under heavy braking (even though it's protected by thick 1/2" plywood) which knocked the drive tray loose. All the text on the screen went red. I pulled over and pushed the drive back in to place. I'd be interested to hear if your display test is white (the DVR thinks all is well with the HD) during the blocks of time where it's not recording. When it 'cuts out' what symptoms are you seeing? HD light off?

Is the MOB1304NET available in the US? I have seen the EB1304MOB and NV1304MOB, but I'm specifically looking for the new one with wifi/gps functions.

Cool, Thanks!

i can send you as many as you like from the uk Do they autoswitch from PAL to NTSC? How much do they go for over there? My expereince from splitting my time between the US/UK is that if I pay a dollar for it here, I'll pay a pound for it in the UK, and that means everything costs between 1.5 and 2x more. For comparison I could go out today and buy an EB1304MOB for $400 / GBP250 new. How does that compare?

sorry i sent wrong link. it is also made in IDE. You sure about that? I cannot find any green ide drives.

The automotive HD (Seagate ST980818AM) has an 8MB cache. The DVR is controlled by a power controller I made myself, and there's a fuse subpanel I added for everything. The DVR and screen are on one fuse - and it's a 3 amp fuse. Well, they draw 3amps, so I'm pretty close to the limit there. Seems to me that a fuse near it's limit tends to act as a resistor, so I wonder if the small fuse is reducing the current/voltage at all? I put in a 5amps fuse instead. We'll see if that helps. The circuit I'm drawing from has a 20 amp fuse and is 14 or 16 gauge wire (which is good to about 8 amps over about 4 metres / 12 feet) So that wire is fine. So at this point I should have no issues with voltage/current, the wires are all capable of carrying many times the measured current requirments of the system. The DVR is cradled like a newborn baby and the HD is a ruggedized autmotive unit that reprts no errors in SMART and no bad sectors. I checked right now - I have 4 days history and no corrupt video as of right now. I'll run this for 2 weeks and recheck for corruption.

I have tried 3.5" desktop hard drives, but they don't work down to the temps we see in winter. Gonna be -18c this weekend. Last year it got down to -30c in this area. Park the car outside for an hour and the drive simply won't spin up. The operating shock rating is only a fraction of this automotive drive also. This hard drive is specifically designed to go in a car and handle the cold/hot temps and vibration/shock. That's another reason that I'm not thinking my problem is vibration or shock - at least not at the hard drive level. There's a few different connections in there that could be getting a flaky signal due to vibration. Well I was going to run a 10 gauge wire and as I got in there I realized the ground connection for the whole system is a 16 guage cable. Not good. I added a 10 gauge ground wire about 20cm long direct to a good ground point. Also I use an ammeter to see how much current is being used - about 2 amps without the screen on, 3 amps with it on. Gonna look up max amp draw over distance. The DVR is connected to a constant +12 that was already in the trunk (trunk light) but that goes to the front of the car and is a 14 gauge wire. I have to figure out how big that fuse is (the extra 3amps may require a slightly bigger fuse).

What do you recommend?

Ugly? Yes. This is just a quick test. This is foam that's been cut to fit the HD and hold it securely while providing about 1/4" of controlled movement in each direction to absorb shock/vibration without a spring/rebound effect. The DVR is also bolted to a piece of OSB that's sitting on folded duvet/comforter (along with factory rubber HD tray mounts and rubber DVR mounts). This setup is so insulated from vibration that if it can't protect a HD rated for 300G operating shock then no reasonable further damping steps are apparent to me. If the HD corrupts this time then I'm going to assume that the problem is not vibration.

What I'm working on now is installing the 2.5" automotive hard drive back in the 3.5" bay with extra foam cushioning. Basically I put a couple strips of thick antistatic foam in the drive bay, sat teh HD on the foam then marked the outline. Then I cut a recess for the HD to sit in. This doubles the amount of cushioning available for the HD. Plus the HD is rated for 300Gs of *operating* shock. The other reason I haven't made the jump to SSD is that I'm not convinced my problem is vibration or shock related. The HDs show no bad sectors or SMART errors. I'm thinking power delivery may be an issue. I'm looking at putting in a dedicated fat wire right from the battery, and using the existing power wire to flip a relay instead. Aver still say they've never seen this issue before. Have you contacted Aver about your issue? support.aver.com My case# is 2132-MAKG-2161 (USA Support team) if your support person claims this issue has never been seen before.

Nope. Even when mounted horzontally it still gets corrupted. Out of the last 30 days 3 days worth of video are unusable. I'm going to try the automotive hard drive again now that the system is horizontal. Anyone got any better ideas? SSD of the kind of speed required is still very expensive.

So wait... Customer comes in for a quote, and tells you he's comparing quotes... And at some later time you see he has CCTV installed... You are saying that he used your expertise that you put in your quote to purchase the gear you specified and install it himself, right? How you you know he didn't just find a cheaper quote, like he said he was looking for?

Does the DVR have a feature to email or ftp? Would need DNS for that.

Prior installation: Now it's sitting flat on a piece of OSB cut to fit the trunk floor. If that solves the corruption issues then I'll make a mounting bracket up under the rear deck / parcel shelf. (This was taken during installation - the wiring was tidied up for regular use! I also made a false panel from OSB that was covered in trunk carpeting that hid/protected this area. The install was invisible to people looking in the trunk.

Well, for now the cheapest test is to install the DVR horizontally. It uses up too much trunk space now though. I'll just have ot wait and see if it corrupts again.

I'll try that, tnx. So if the WD drive (that has no apparent bandwidth issues) can only sustain 50mb/sec then an SSD that has a "Sustained write speed" of 50mb/sec would be the performance equivalent?

My automotive HD run at 100MBytes / sec. Model ST980818AM, page 10/50 in this spec sheet: http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/disc/manuals/ce/EE25%20Series/EE25.2/100448541e.pdf The same advertised data transfer rate is true for my current drive (WD1600JB) but the seek time is much less that the automotive drive because the spingle speed is 7200 instead of 5400. I'm going to bolt the dvr onto a piece of OSB and set that flat in the trunk, see if that stops the corruptions.

Do you need volume quantity or just one? Best, Christopher 74G gave me 7 days of driving history. 32G would give me 3 days. 16G would give me today and half of yesterday unless I ran errands. If you can fine me a 32GB IDE SLC that can sustain 100M/Sec for less than $500 then I might take a look. Even then, Aver says it's untested and may not work. I'm going to take a look at using an IDE-SATA converter because SATA SLC are much faster but no cheaper. My automotive HD (seagate 2.5") could not keep up with the data rate. I'm looking for it's performance spects now. the SMART scan on the seagate drive revealed no logged errors

I do not think these units are designed for auto use. What does the military do to mount computers in tanks, and other vehicles? I can see a modified version of a hard drive for "combat" use, but I would think that the mounting, or shock absorbing designs could be incorporated in to a weekend project? It would be interesting to see if one could change shock absorbers, and get the car to ride slightly smoother, and figure a way to mount a hard drive with an shock absorbing mount. I wonder how NASA does it? Can you set up a PC based system with a raid? I used a Seagate Automotive Hard drive. Cost me $200 for 80GB. Failed in 9mo. I think the problem is that the HD shock absorption does not work properly unless the DVR is mounted horizontally.

That is my weekend project coming up. I'm going to make a bracket to mount it under the parcel shelf. Will post results.

Anyone tried an IDE to SATA converter (to allow you to plug a SATA drive into a device that is expecting an IDE hard drive...) Tried one in my CPCam 507HC and it didn't work out. Oh well. Won't recognize the drive - the drive doesn't even spin up. Going to try the converter in another device just to make sure it's not a bad converter. EDIT: Just looked at my other computer - This IDE/SATA adapter is missing the power connection! Back to the store monday for a power adapter!

So you switched the connections at the DVR and sent came 2 into ports 3 and vice-versa, and the same DVR channel (now a different camera) is still purple? If so, and the factory reset didn't do it then I'd agree with your initial assessment that the channel is bad.

The only thing I can suggest is a hardware reset back to factory settings.

Interesting. If you can read/delete the smart data then you can get relatively quick feedback on how the HD is doing in the environment (virbation etc) and continue to refine the cradle until the error rate improves. How do you read this smart data? HD utlity software from the manufacturer, or freeware?