Question use Surveillance hard drive for non windows data storage desktop pc ?

andrepartthree

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Hi guys :) ... well I finally came to my sense and ditched Directv (they're nice and all but prices have really skyrocketed lately) .. which left me with a " Seagate SkyHawk 4TB Surveillance Hard Drive - SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Drive (ST4000VX007) " - just copied and pasted the amazon description there :p - which I was using for external storage for the DVR.

Tried doing some google research re: whether or not this would work as a secondary desktop hard drive (not the primary hard drive you install windows in) and I'm seeing all sorts of conflicting results from various users across various websites, some saying don't do it, others saying they use it fine for that sort of thing without any problem ... I'm aware that the speed for the seagate is slower than the 7200 rpm for a hard drive designed specifically for desktop use ( which would be more ideal I realize)... the seagate would be used primarily for music, videos (quite possibly hour long videos , like my son's band concert recording off a camcorder for example), pdf books and older comic book purchases (cbz files back in the day when publishers like Image used to let you download your purchases off comixology)... so the files wouldn't be ones I would be really "changing" on a routine basis like say a microsoft word document, I would just be viewing the files whenever I felt like being entertained :)

It just would be really nice to get some use out of this given how much money I paid for it :p .. anyone have any thoughts? And as always thanks to anyone who reads this and replies :)
 
There is a good chance that you can't just use the drive as is (which is probably why you've seen that people have had problems doing the same thing). Your best approach would probably be to get a copy of GParted Live USB and use that to delete the partition(s) on the drive, re-partition it for windows uws, and format it to NTFS.

After that's done, you should be able to use it as you mentioned, with no problems.
 

andrepartthree

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Thanks so much for this AllanGH and for your quick reply too I appreciate it :) .. I was wondering though.. if I just downloaded the program directly to Windows at this link

https://gparted.org/download.php

would that work too ? I have an external dock I can use to connect the hard drive to Windows ... or alternately just install the hard drive directly into the desktop (connect to motherboard via sata port) and use the Windows version of the program to perform the steps you mentioned above?
 

andrepartthree

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Well ignore what I said about downloading it to Windows, stupid me it says right there on the website " don't use within Windows" :p .. so will be downloading the iso to the usb drive and booting off that like I should be :)

Feel free to laugh at me but I watched a youtube tutorial on how to use the program :p, I'm paranoid about clicking on the "wrong" thing and screwing things up but it looks pretty straightforward.. the only thing confusing me is the " re-partition it for windows uws " part , tried google researching it and couldn't find an answer... is "uws" an option that comes up in the program? (maybe in the "partition" menu you can select "uws")? Or basically just delete the partition, reformat as NTFS and that's it?
 

andrepartthree

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I'm pretty sure he meant 'for Windows use' so NTFS or GPT.
You know I was wondering if it was something like that but I was so paranoid I wanted to be sure - thank you popatim ! :)

I'm a few weeks away from installing the 4 TB hard drive (strange as it sounds technical support at Directv advised me to wait a few weeks after disconnecting to make absolutely sure the hard drive uploads the " Hey I'm really not being used anymore Directv" info so I don't get billed by them for service I'm no longer using :p ) ...

.... but when I get it up and running I will post here and let everyone know how it went in case this thread helps other people (my google search shows others have asked it before and this thread might probably pop up in future google searches if someone is wondering about it which is the only reason I say all of this :) )
 

andrepartthree

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Whats your external storage got to do with them. LoL
Proceed with formatting it with your PC. The external can't "phone home", it just has recordings on it.

Thank you Popatim :) ...you know I was wondering about that myself :p ... results when you talk to tech support anywhere can vary I think, you can get a well meaning tech support person who gives you the answer s/he THINKS is correct but really isn't (which could be very well what's going on here with the Directv tech support person when he told me that) ..
 

andrepartthree

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Well so far so good, I admit I've been using the hard drive all of one day so far but after using gparted as per the kind advice above, hard drive is up and running :) ...

Windows (8.1) of course decided to screw me over for a while and got the old " ethernet 3 doesn't have a valid ip configuration " and " an error occurred while renewing internet interface 3 : unable to contact your dhcp server request has timed out " error messages that occur when your PC decides to stop connecting to the internet for some reason known only to itself , ran the usual troubleshooting steps (ipconfig release, ipconfig renew, restart PC) with no luck - then the PC suddenly caught itself and I could connect to the internet again... Windows is a temperamental beast and I'm sure this won't necessarily happen to someone else just because it happened to me (not sure if it had to do with me foolishly not uninstalling my sata DVD reader/writer - had to disconnect it since this was hard drive number six I'm adding to my PC).

I've put a reminder into Microsoft Outlook to come back and update this thread a year from now to let people know if things are still going smoothly (mainly in case this helps someone else even outside of the forum - threads like these pop up in google searches even if one is not part of the forum community so could help someone out there on the 'net ).. thanks again everyone :) ..