Video Surveillance Systems

[RVR II]

My old 2006 video surveillance system's 500G hard drive finally died. It's a 8 camera setup with a DVR/monitor system I bought from Super Circuits for $2500 dollars back then.
The hard drive was a IDE Ultra ATA133 500GB Maxtor. Not a fan of Maxtors at all
Priced another 500GB IDE 44 pin hard drive and they're running over $125 for a Western Digital
Found an IDE to SATA adapter for under $8 on ebay that I think will work and I can install it with a Seagate 750GB hard drive I have as a spare.

Now-a-days you can pick up a Zmodo surveillance setup similar to mine for less than $100 dollars w/o hard drive to $150 dollars w/ 1TB hard drive..
What a difference 10 years can make

[MartyS (Gromit)]

 We have a few of those Zmodo systems in the biology labs at work to record animal behavior, can't beat that price for a 4 camera with infrared lights for night recording.  Students can access the data any time with the web interface.  If only using 1 or 2 cameras you can record for something like a month on a 1TB drive.

[RVR II]

We have a few of those Zmodo systems in the biology labs at work to record animal behavior, can't beat that price for a 4 camera with infrared lights for night recording.  Students can access the data any time with the web interface.  If only using 1 or 2 cameras you can record for something like a month on a 1TB drive.

We have a 4 camera Zmodo system in our boutique in Mexico I shipped down there a couple years ago after our boutique was robbed and we're supposed to be able to check it here in the states from down there but could never get it to work..
The internet is still DSL phone lines and we think that's part of or the problem.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

We have a few of those Zmodo systems in the biology labs at work to record animal behavior, can't beat that price for a 4 camera with infrared lights for night recording.  Students can access the data any time with the web interface.  If only using 1 or 2 cameras you can record for something like a month on a 1TB drive.

We have a 4 camera Zmodo system in our boutique in Mexico I shipped down there a couple years ago after our boutique was robbed and we're supposed to be able to check it here in the states from down there but could never get it to work..
The internet is still DSL phone lines and we think that's part of or the problem.

The systems we have at work that are several years old have really strange requirements for accessing over the web, it only works with explorer, and even then you've got to go through a long list of explorer settings to change in order to get access.  Of course if the IP address in Mexico is dynamic and keeps changing you would need someone to go in and get the new address from the network menu every time it changes.

[RVR II]

Yeah it's a real pain.. We've pretty much given up trying to access it from here

[RVR II]

Well shit! The 750GB EIDE hard drive I bought last year just crashed today so it's not recording anything now..
That adapter for a SATA hard drive didn't work like I had thought it would (I.E. not recording video), so now I either try to find another 500-750GB hard drive with the old EIDE connection or save up for a whole new DVR & camera system (which could take a while in my current financial state..

[RVR II]

Had a quick popup thunderstorm here and had a lightning strike close enough to my house that it burned out my HDMI port on my home surveillance DVR.
I upgraded my old 12 year old DVR system 9 months ago and then it gets partially fried. I don't know if the Canavis brand DVR has a year warranty or not as Amazon only offered 30 days so I am not taking any chances and I went ahead and ordered another brand that's more compatible with my upgraded security cameras (Zosi brand DVR w/ Zosi cameras) that I can just swap out the hard drive and connect up the cameras to in minutes.