Will any old hard drive do?

[fas 0]

I notice a lot of the dvr's have removable hard drives. If I have a 200gig hard drive laying around, can I use it in a dvr? Do you need special formatting, or will the dvr do that itself? Thanks.

[VST_Man 1]

the dvr manual/specs will tell you the speed/size required. ie. upto a 5400/300Gb. not any ole hard drive will work.........and after that the dvr will "initialize" the hard drive.

[RVRBOY420007 0]

Ya some hard drives are not compatible with some dvr's plus you have to be careful not to void your warranty by using your own HD even if it is compatible

[wetwire 0]

PC based - The simple answer is no. Not if you care about customer relations anyway. Hard dives WILL fail in DVRs. A DVR is very taxing on a hard drive. I have RMAed many a hard drive and I have noticed a trend in manufactures. WD and Maxtor both have started to question DVR usage when RMAing a drive. They have also started product lines like the "Enterprise Edition" for said target market.

[griffonsystems 0]

i only use western digital and knock on wood havent had a failure yet.. my tivo failed after a year and i opened it up and found a crapy maxtor drive in it so i will stay away from them for my surveillance dvrs

[kandcorp 0]

We use Western Digital SATA Hard Drives:

 

Personally they run a lot cooler than standard IDE drives, i think. Ever since we made the switch to SATA from IDE we have had no problems. Also, no big bulky IDE cables blocking case airflow.

 

If your MOBO supports them I would go SATA.

 

Also, they look better, all black:

 

 

Or you could go with there new Raptor 10,000RPM SATA Clear Cover HDD if you want to get real fancy :

[wetwire 0]

Definite +s on the SATA ...can you say "easy as pie hot-swapable"