Visionsat IV-200 PVR with laptop HD?

[concord]

Has anyone tried a laptop hard drive yet with the visionsat?

Finally got around to adding a drive, an old WD 28GB ide drive. The poor drive is really stressed out especially when playing ; also the bottom ticker/banner would be jerky. I was wondering how a newer sata (5400rpm) laptop drive would fare.

 

[Anole]

Well, first the Visionsat takes a USB 2.0 hard drive.
That could be any ATA/IDE ...or... SATA drive in an external cabinet with at least a USB 2.0 interface.

I'm currently using a new Western Digital 500gb external USB drive.
Think it was $79 ? after rebate at one of the usual office stores.
Came with its own small switching power supply.

Previously, I'd used an external WD Portable drive
That's where they put an IDE laptop drive in a little box with USB interface, and power the whole thing through the USB cable.
Used a 60gb unit, and it worked dandy.
If I had to guess, I'd suspect it was 4200rpm, not 5400, nor the more common 7200 you see in real drives.
It would record one show, while playing another.

 

[concord]

Anole,

Should have mentioned it was an old 3.5" out of my old dual 500Mhz PIII that I built several years ago, not a laptop drive. I placed in a USB case I had around, the drive has a high pitched wine to it, so it may not last much longer.

I have a 2.5" sata case, just need a drive...newegg has 120GB at a nice price but didn't want to spend the money if it didn't work well....Thanks for the info.

 

[Anole]

Last weekend, Fry's had a 160gb laptop ddrive with choice of IDE or SATA interface for... I think it was $69
Sounded good, but my 500gb cost only $10 more.

Plus, I don't recommend using a USB-powered case.
I did, and it worked, but ... it was actually a complete system intended to work that way.
Not a separately available case.

 

[Larry1]

The desktop drives are usually cheaper, faster and larger capacity than the notebook drives. Last week the local store here had the Hitachi 500GB SATA 3.5" 7200 RPM drive on special for $49.99, this week it's back to $65.99. The larger drives are great for archiving your TV shows.

 

[concord]

Due space limitation and noise considerations, I'm going to try a 2.5 drive first.

We have several Maxtors in the lab, they are ok there as the noise level of our Unix systems drown them out anyways. But in the living room, I don't want to add anymore noise (have a 722 DVR there now!).