Best hard drive for storing HD movies

[fa66ster]

I have a humax box which is recording all my movies from BBC, C4, Film 4 and the like, trouble is the 500gb is now at capacity!

I wish to put all those movies onto a portable hard drive which I can take anywhere and plug in anywhere! I have a Freecom tough drive which I thought would enable me to do this, trouble is I think it only takes approx 4gb of each movie and cuts the end off - Is this something to do with FAT32 or something?

Are all drives going to have this issue because off film decoding by broadcaster? Or is there an obvious solution?

Thanks in advance.

 

[MarkE19]

FAT32 does have a single file size limit of 4Gb, so larger files must be copied to a HDD with a file system such as NTFS or Ext3 (Linux file system and likely what the PVR is using).

There is no best HDD for video, even HD video will play from a Green HDD. I rip all my Blu-ray movies to my server and that has Green HDD's which are slower than normal drives. But this causes no issues for me as the drives are still capable of more speed than is required.

IIRC all HD broadcasts are encrypted and can therefore only be played back by the PVR, but SD broadcasts should be fine as long as you get a media player that can handle the files - normally mpeg-2 .ts files IIRC.

You would likely get more answers to this if you click on the '!Report' button and ask a moderator of this section (not me unfortunately) to move it to the PVR section of the forum where this question gets asked a fair bit - PVRs | AVForums

Mark.

 

[grahamlthompson]

The Foxsat cannot natively use a NTFS drive.

To copy long SD programmes (> 4GB) the drive has to be formatted EXT3. To read EXT3 on a PC you have to install a separate driver.

The 100% solution is to install the Custom Firmware and directly copy the files to a PC or your usb formatted ntfs drive connected to a PC. You can also work with future HD recordings if Nowsters patch is installed.