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Hard Drive question

A few weeks ago I bought a used 500 gig SATA hard drive off of somebody here at DSLR. I tested the drive with HD Tune and the only thing was that it seems to get quite hot.

I thought I'd use it on my DVR (Comcast) for a few months before I put it in my system because the HD in the DVR is tiny and there is a USB plug so you can add a drive.

Well, problem is, with the drive, recordings glitch out, no sound, stuttering, artifacts, unwatchable.

What would be the reason? It's a 3.5" SATA of older vintage, probably pretty heavily used.

Could the problem be the DVR (after removing the drive recorded shows play fine)?
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USB may not be fast enough and/or hard drive may not be fast enough. Another possibility is the drive is erroring

N/M

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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing - Edmund Burke

Chances are the drive or USB interface itself just isn't fast enough. I one took a video to a friend on a USB flash drive and it wouldn't play without stuttering and pausing. I was playing the video from the flash drive. When I copied it to his desktop I saw why. It took 5 minutes to copy a 3-4 minute video lol.

One thing concerns me though.

Ah, got ya, ok, well I added the drive and THEN rebooted so that the drive was recognized and utilized. Then for a couple weeks saved shows (you can't specifically choose which drive, it just records) and all the recorded shows were dirt. Shut the DVR off and removed the drive and restarted, recorded some shows, and it is fine. The drive on the DVR is just too small, I don't know its size, but I can only save a small number of HD shows.
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Join Teams Helix and Discovery. Rest in Peace, Leonard David Smith, my best friend, you are missed badly! Rest in peace, Pop, glad our last years were good. Please pray for Colin, he has ependymoma, a brain cancer, donate to a children's Hospital.

I cannot speak of the Sata version, but IDE version drives used in DVR boxes used 'Quickview' drives, which had different code in the drive such that if it encountered a bad spot in the media, instead of stopping and re-trying, just continued on.
Now you could put in a normal hard drive in place of a quickview drive, as long as it didn't find a bad spot during the playback... I have used a computer drive in a DVR, and as I found a bad spot, I narrowed down the location and saved the recording as a "bad Clip" and as long as I don't free it up (erase the recording) the remainder of the drive worked beautifully....

You might have encountered this...

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No, I understand what you are describing. No, in my case the sound won't work in recordings (seemingly all of them), and there are endless glitches, in other words, unusable.

Thanks for that information, I forgot that the drives they use could be different logic wise.
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Join Teams Helix and Discovery. Rest in Peace, Leonard David Smith, my best friend, you are missed badly! Rest in peace, Pop, glad our last years were good. Please pray for Colin, he has ependymoma, a brain cancer, donate to a children's Hospital.