Hello all,
I just got my Symdec today. I hooked up the monitor and powered it up and low an behold Drive 1 has a failure. It is toast. I have spoken with the company that I bought it from and he will either refund me the cost of a new 500g hard drive or order me another.

My question is that the hard drive that is used is WD5000YS. How much are they retail? Should I have him just refund me 150.00 and buy another used HD? The unit works fine when I disconnected the HD. Just show only 3 being used.

Am I able to use 1TB Hard Drives?

Marquette, first things first.. if you just bought it and there is a failure, do not compromise the warranty... This unit comes with three years exchange warranty. Have the unit replaced with another new system.

By changing the hard drives is not the solution. Even though this unit is an embedded system (one of the best embedded systems in the market, if not the best), you do not know why the hard drive failed. What if the problem is also caused by faulty power supply or some other part within the system?

This system takes four hard drives, you can have it higher capacity than its original hard drive configuration.

We had this system operating with 3TB configuration per customer request. I know it will work operate at 4TB (using four 1TB drives) or even 6TB (using four 1.5TB drives). You may have to update the BIOS (dependent when it was manufactured or if it has the lastest BIOS setting).

It may not be the easiest system to program, but once you get a handle on it, you will get some exceptional picture video quality at D1 resolution.

The unit was purchased used. (I got a great deal on it). The hard drive most likely failed cause of the great care UPS takes with its packages. When you powered it up you could hear the drive clicking away. All I did was pwered down and disconnected it.

I have tested the video and all other settings. Everything works fine. I am able to view through Symbrowser and Symnav. I have loaded the latest firmware on it.

From what you have said I will just wait and get a couple of 1.5tb drive for it. Is there anything special that I need to look for?
TIA
Denver

I just checked with Western Digital. The hard drive is still under warrenty. I should be getting a new one next week.

Never been a fan of WD drives... I've had more failures with that brand than any other (and they didn't even fail in DVRs... these were all in regular desktop systems I've built, which is light duty compared to a DVR)

Seagate makes an entire line of drives for surveillance applications. I'd recommend going with those.

Even if the system was purchased used, it should still be under warranty! The only reason I am stressing this fact is because this product was introduced in this market less than three years ago... and if anything else fails besides the drives, then you are hosed... There is a motherboard and few other special components in this system that you will not be able to purchase from anywhere nor GE will sell you these parts. I personally will not take the chance with it even though it may be just only the drive failure...

As for anything special - you need to find a utility in GE website (very easy to do - just create an account, log in and it is there), that will be required to "add" certain files in a section of the hard drive allowing to communicate with it over their browser...

Another option - if the drive is working semi-ok... just do a complete hard drive copy by matching exact drive size and you can use a drive copy utility to perform this task - Western Digital has an excellent utility that allows to copy any system drive... This way you do not need to use this special utility... Just take a higher capacity drive, partition exact same size of the system drive in this system and then perform complete drive copy and that is all...

As you already confirmed, the hard drive is under warranty... That means your entire system is still under warranty.

Good luck and let us know the outcome...