Security Cameras & External Hard Drive

[Ali9]

Hi everyone,

I recently purchased a new hard drive that I can record my surveillance footage with, the only problem I am having at the moment is that I click record onto the hard drive and after a while the hard drive goes into sleep mode or whatever. Then at the end of it all when I decide to stop recording it doesn't save onto my hard drive.

So all I need to know really is there any way of keeping my hard drive running all the time so that it doesn't go into this sleep mode.

I have already gone into my power settings and disabled the USB selective suspend setting and this hasn't worked for me.

Thanks (Y)

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
seems to me that you've got two problems here.

1) The recording camera software -- IMO this should be writing to disk every so often rather than waiting to the end of the recording -- I don't know the software but since its security related it must be capable of creating decent timestamps and write to a log file every so often. You should perhaps depending on the software even be able to have the logs re use themselves say after 5 logs have been created --overwrite log 1 again etc.

Without knowing the setup / settings of this program its impossible to say why data isn't being written to the disk --maybe it IS but to a file on drive C and you have to copy the data manually. I should definitely look at this.


2) Power / sleep / hibernate settings on the computer --ensure that disks are turned off --never, computer isn't hibernated / screen saved etc.

You CAN have the screen to switch off after so many minutes --that won't be a problem.

Another silly problem believe it or not is that the hard disc can be filled so it will stop -- but the directory entry is not written so the disk still appears empty or at least your footage won't be there.

Video footage can consume INORDINATE amounts of data if the compression etc isn't set decently.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Ali9]

Hi Jimbo thanks alot for your reply, The camera has no software that it came with, it has firmware that is viewed using an IE browser, for the price we paid for the camera it is absolutely rubbish. (Axis Communications)

I will test the above right now and have a look around, but as you say I have had problems with a "full" c: drive before. And the problem was that I couldn't find any of the files that were supposedly taking up this space. I did a search for 'gigantic' files and '.asf' files and couldn't find anything. I also searched all the hidden files and folders but still had no luck so I had to format my C: drive.

I then went and bought an external TB just purely to record to it, I manage to record to it just until the external drive decides that its time for it to go to sleep then when I stop recording nothing is saved to the drive, and there is no change in the space left on the drive.

Referring to sleep/hibernate settings on my computer all that is already sorted it was just my external hard drive. that I need to prevent from going to 'power save' or 'sleep mode'