Yankeepapa

Recon: Thanks for the head's up on nomenclature. You know -- going into this project I was thinking that some Marine Corps ingenuity might be the biggest part of fixin this bit of widgetry. Did a little over 18-months of my hitch (70-74) out there in your area stationed at MCAS(H) Santa Ana, flying as a crew chief with HMM-163. (YP-Yankeepapa) The CH-46's that had eyes painted on their noses. Kinda funny how you wake up every day with a bit of the Corps stuck in your head ... Ever catch yourself clutching bags in your left hand when you're carrying groceries ... cause you're instinctively prepared to salute? It's permanently ingrained in your "brain housing group." Anyway ... I just wanted to say I appreciate you lending the benefit of your expertise to me ... and if I don't see you here, I'll look for you on the other side. Semper Fi

I've been planning to build a DVR card/ PC based system to replace my Sanyo 3016, since I heard the "click of death" coming from its hard drive (ATA/133 5400 RPM Maxor) about 2-weeks ago. Images on the monitor started blinking so I figured it was time to pull the plug and I opened the DVR up. There wasn't a speck of dust in it. Seemed a bit wierd for a unit that has been running for 32,000 hours. As a retired electrician, I figure that a dangerous shock warning tells me I need to steer clear of a capacitor ... simple enough ... I'm wondering if swapping out this unit's hard drive is practical. If it is plug-n-play then I can do that. Hate the idea of buying an IDE drive to replace it. Looking at Seagate's SV35 SATA drives for my new system. I bought the DVR in 2003. Have a Belkin PCM/CIA network interface card for it, but as my computer is a Mac and the DVR is geared for Windows based PC's, I never installed it. Sanyo says "send it in ... we'll fix it." They don't have any local repair options. Would like to plug an SATA drive into it, dispense with master/slave jumper factors, and have a drive that I can plug into the new system when I get it together. Seems like I would need an SATA controller and software to drive it. The DVR's 30-fps and 160GB capacity is pretty limited ... lack of local service precludes my ability to determine if fixing a unit that I only intend to use for another 2-3 months is a cost effective. I just bought some Watec 902 ultra's, so I have a lot of low lux cameras but not much real time storage capacity to record the images they gather. Any ideas about how to keep this thing running for a couple more months would be greatly appreciated.