New to the subject, HDD info?

[lemonoid 0]

My friend owns a body shop that recently had a break in. they are currently on a system with old cameras and VCR recording. He wants to upgrade to a newer system and has found a nice set of indoor/outdoor day/night and motion activated recording cameras on sale with good reviews. Now he is onto the task of browsing DVR devices for his recording. There are a bunch they he is looking iNto and i'm helping him out because he is not at all good with electronics. I've found plenty with good reviews and remote access like he wants but I need to know what's up with hard drives. Some come pre installed and some without. Obviously storage space is needed. But my question is would it really be a pain to write to an external if there is USB support or does it have to be the type specified as `compatible ` such as SATA? if he for some reason would want to purchase one without and then have me install it for him, would (in this case SATA) the hard drive have to be one made for CCTV DVR? Or could I use a regular HDD for PC/lap top as long as size was right? Thanks fit your help.

[trythis 0]

SATA just refers to Serial ATA. That is a very standard drive and is what is most likely in any computer you have unless it is more than 5 years old or so (guessing there) Previously it would have been PATA or Parallel ATA.

 

I am not sure about the required quality of drive. I see very high prices for disc drives sold by CCTV dvr sellers' sites. I dont know if it is profit, an expense to cover insurance for installing the drives, or if they are getting some very special drives. Often they are priced in the range of 10K RPM SCSI drives used in servers but you can buy 1TB Enterprise class drives for $130 or so. Desktop class would be a little bit cheaper and I dont know specifically what the difference is.

 

I have read that with cheap drives, if they lose a sector the DVR just stops working because it doesn't know how to handle relocating the data or something like that. I dunno, maybe someone can speak to this issue with experience.

 

The worst thing about hard drives right now is the flooding in Thailand causing drive prices to go up 100% over just 6 months ago.

[SectorSecurity 0]

Right now hard drive prices have gone back up some, due to the flooding in Thiland. Generally most SATA drives are the same, yes some are built to be greener and some for speed and performance. As far as bad sectors that would be more so up to the DVR how to handle it and usually its just marked as bad and ignored.

 

I have found that a constant recording works better as it keeps the drive spinning, instead of the constant start and stop of motion activated recored. For a 1TB drive right now you are looking between $130-180 depending on the class you go with. I would not worry about SCSI and would say stick with SATA.

 

As for external you have to remember USB will have a slower write speed then a regular SATA drive, so as far as using an external it can be done but may not work as well. I would suggest purchases 1 or 2 SATA 1TB drives. Installation is usually as simple as opening the cover of the DVR and inserting the correct cables into the drives.