Is it feasible to use an external hard drive to save video images. Have 16 cameras which I would like to record 24 hrs a day. Any suggestions?

i'll take care of it

must be extremely bored today I see.

i didn't figer anyone could help ya sounds complicated

there are dvr's made specifically for video surveillance...

check out "security " products distributors

hope it's ok, just emailed you .

Absolutely. In fact, I'd recommend separating those images on a separate drive. That way you're not burning up space on your primary drive which you use for other things. Be sure to buy a drive large enough to meet your needs. You'll want to figure out how long you need to keep the files and how large the files are and go from there. You'll also want to set up your software to automatically delete older files as space is needed.

thanks for your reply - right now looking into a terabyte ext. hard drive, as info/videos will need to be stored indefinitely. can/should an external hard drive be used to store info/data/videos indefinitely. Need to be able to connect and view info at will.

A TB is a good start. I'm assuming these are security cameras which means the quality will be lower which means smaller files. However, the drive will eventually fill up. Based on the size of the files you should be able to estimate how long it would take to run out of space. To save space, if you can set your cameras to only record when there is movement in the area that would greatly help, vs. having them record 24/7 even when there is nothing going on.

Thank you John - appreciate your time and help

For what it is worth--I love the idea of an EX-HD. When I converted from a PC to a Mac I purchased a 320G EX-HD and loaded everything on it then turned and put it on my Mac. I had not used one prior to this and that it was tied to nothing but a USB cable made the trasfer nice. Now I use it as a backup drive and it works perfectly. I wish you well as you move your things but now, more than ever, there is no reason to not have documents backed up. It is just too easy and too cheap not to have backups for everything.

-Drew

Agreed and thanks

holy shiznit!!!


16 cameras recording 24 hours a day?

is it a high security prison?

lol no

but due to legal issues all recordings must be on a 24 hr clock, not at set times...

Externals are the best for storage.... esp with vids, music, pictures... it saves space on your primary hd... you would probably need more than one for your setup... depending on the quality of the video being recorded and how long you want to save the video files

I think one large drive, external or not would be fine. You could hire a programmer to write a program to grab the previous days videos and burn them onto a DVD(s) or you could do that yourself manually every day. DVDs are cheaper than buying new HDDs every time one fills up.

thanks to all

yes made options available to customer, he's decided to have someone manually burn dvd's. I am saving them as files at an hourly interval, so as shifts change they can burn 7-8 files onto dvds.

Possible, yes. Good idea - not really. Reason being, is they will occasionally dismount, without saying anything to you. And might be days before you notice.

Better idea - save locally, and use a external drive of some type to store backup files. The backup software will usually have a way to email you a status every morning - so at least you will know if there is a problem.

You can get a 6TB external WD hard drive from mwave.com